“File on 4” – “Contracts of Interest”

BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4

TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “CONTRACTS OF INTEREST”

CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP

TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 22nd June 2021 2000 - 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 27th June 2021 1700 - 1740

REPORTER: Paul Connolly PRODUCER: Anna Meisel EDITOR: Gail Champion

PROGRAMME NUMBER: 21VQ6377LT0 - 1 -

THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

“FILE ON 4”

Transmission: Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Repeat: Sunday 27th June 2021

Producer: Anna Meisel Reporter: Paul Connolly Editor: Gail Champion

MUSIC

READER IN STUDIO: Sunday 22nd March 2020 at 1622.

READER 2 IN STUDIO: Someone please ensure that they have the 530K within 24 hours from now and report back to me it’s been sent. No procurement, no lawyers, no meetings, no delay please – just send immediately.

CONNOLLY: That’s a word-for-word excerpt from an email written by Dominic Cummings just a day before Boris Johnson ordered a national lockdown. It forms parts of a confidential email chain seen by File on 4 that sheds new light on the Government’s approach to spending public money in the chaotic early days of the pandemic.

MAUGHAN: There was no process that I can see before the decision was made to award this very substantial sum. I think even worse is what the email chain reveals about the culture that’s predominating in Government at the time.

CONNOLLY: The thrust of Mr Cummings’ message is that he wants a grant for more than a half a million pounds to be fast-tracked, and what’s scattered across the rest of email trail suggests that civil servants tasked with making that happen had serious - 2 -

CONNOLLY cont: concerns about the timeframe in which they were ordered to do it, and whether it was in line with the rules.

SMITH: The fact is, they were putting the senior people in Department of Health and elsewhere into a very difficult position. I think it was unethical, immoral really, and yes, it was an abuse of power.

CONNOLLY: This is a joint investigation between the BBC, the Guardian and Source Material, a non-profit investigative organisation. The emails we’ve seen involve staff working at NHSX – an opaque, data-focused body entrusted with the huge task of digitising the NHS, using taxpayers’ money. So, why were these emails supposed to be kept confidential?

SOURCE: A member of the senior leadership team was being very explicit that people should not share this. In my view, that’s because it is so damaging to the NHSX. Dominic Cummings, Matt Hancock - everyone is just being very blatant that due process and procedures are being thrown out the window.

CONNOLLY: And by unpicking intricate financial records, we reveal donations made to the Tory party by a major shareholder in a company repeatedly endorsed by the Secretary of State for Health. So, is the system governing possible conflicts of interest robust enough?

GRAHAM: This would seem to me a fairly massive failure of transparency and this is why there should be an investigation by the appropriate parliamentary watchdogs so that we can get to the bottom of this.

EXTRACT FROM BORIS JOHNSON SPEECH

JOHNSON: Good evening. The coronavirus is the biggest threat this country has faced for decades, and this country is not alone. All over the world ….

READER IN STUDIO: 23rd March 2020.

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JOHNSON: From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction - you must stay at home.

CONNOLLY: For the first time, a nationwide lockdown is imposed. Business owners scramble for short and longer term solutions. For the majority, cashflow slows to a trickle. [MUSIC] One organisation, however, finds itself in a very different kind of scenario. Remarkably, they are having to think twice before accepting a substantial Government grant. The organisation in question is called Our World In Data, a research project run by a charitable organisation wanting to expand its operations producing health data on the pandemic. We’ll explain more about who and what they are shortly. But, for now, let’s rewind just a little - to the day before that now historic lockdown and to the confidential email chain I mentioned at the top of the programme, leaked to File on 4 and to the Guardian and to Source Material. We start with an email sent by Max Roser, Our World In Data’s founder, to William Warr, health advisor to the Prime Minister.

READER IN STUDIO: Sunday 22nd March 2020 at 1252.

READER 2 IN STUDIO: Dear Will, We hope you are well. Below you find the bullet point overview on the current situation in our team and the brief explanation of how funding now would allow us to do the work that we need to do.

CONNOLLY: That email was sent after the charity posted a fundraising message on Twitter. Mr Roser told us that on that very same day, William Warr got in touch. They had a chat and he asked for more information about their situation, which Max Roser then sent by email. But he could never have predicted that his simple fund request would spark an inter-departmental scurry, starring some of the biggest names in Westminster politics, or that the conversation he initiated is now affording all of us a glimpse into how spending decisions were made in the early days of the pandemic.

MUSIC

CONNOLLY: This programme’s producer, Anna Meisel, is going to help me walk you through the key exchanges along that most revealing of email trails.

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MUSIC

CONNOLLY: So, Anna, let’s start then with Our World in Data. Some background on who they are and what they do, as promised.

MEISEL: So, they describe themselves as a collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Oxford and an organisation called Global Change Data Lab, a registered charity. And on their website, they say they provide ‘research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems,’ so they list examples such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war etc.

CONNOLLY: Okay, so they were asking for a grant. How much?

MEISEL: Well, the original request was for £520,000. Later in the chain, the Government officials talk about providing them with £530,000 for some reason and we don’t really know why that is. It could be a typo.

CONNOLLY: Expensive typo, that, isn’t it? Now what did OWID - we’re calling them OWID now, less of a mouthful - want the money for? What was that about?

MEISEL: They explained they needed it in order to retain key members of staff, and those staff were generating data on the pandemic. They also wanted to hire extra contractors and needed financial support for the rising costs of servers and technical infrastructure.

CONNOLLY: Okay, and to be clear, were they then proposing to gather data for Government, for the Department of Health, and the grant would pay for that?

MEISEL: No, they weren’t bidding to provide data to the Government directly. OWID publishes research and stats on their website for free and they simply wanted to expand and publish data relating to the pandemic.

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CONNOLLY: Right, so, let’s pick up then where we left off along the email chain. Where were we?

MEISEL: Sure, so what happens next is that William Warr - health adviser to the Prime Minister - sends the grant request directly to Matthew Hancock, the Health Secretary.

CONNOLLY: No messing about, then. Straight to the top. So, what happens from there? Next step?

MEISEL: Well, just a minute after he receives that email, Hancock sends the following message to Matthew Gould, the CEO of NHSX, which is the unit you talked about earlier, you know, tasked with the digital transformation of the NHS.

READER IN STUDIO: Sunday 22nd March 2020 at 1430.

READER 2 IN STUDIO: This is an NHSX lead. I support. Matthew - grateful if you could look at this to support the data work from ourworldindata.org. Matt.

CONNOLLY: ‘I support’. You can’t get much clearer than that. The grant gets the go-ahead from Matthew Hancock then.

MEISEL: Just like that.

CONNOLLY: So, right, let’s press pause on this just for a minute, because NHSX is a little-known organisation to most people, I think that’s fair to say, and, in the main, these emails are sent between civil servants who work directly for NHSX or have very close links to it. So, here’s Nicholas Carding, a senior correspondent with the Health Service Journal, with a brief explainer.

CARDING: The official reason for setting NHSX up was that it was felt there were too many organisations in the NHS doing different things with technology and there was no organisation or agency that was actually trying to join things up. So, it was

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CARDING cont: felt that NHSX could bring the different bits of the NHS system together by sort of setting a central tech strategy. Overall, there are probably about 100 to 150 staff in total.

CONNOLLY: So, we’ve heard from some of the people in the email chain. Who - and what - next?

MEISEL: Dominic Cummings now weighs in. At the time, he’s still the chief advisor to the Prime Minister, and what’s interesting is that our sources tell us that he held a lot of sway inside the halls of NHSX. The email you’re about to hear follows Hancock’s directly, it’s the next one in the chain, and it’s sent to Matthew Gould, who you will remember is the CEO of NHSX.

READER IN STUDIO: Sunday 22nd March 2020 at 1622.

MUSIC

CONNOLLY: Cummings is in a hurry, he wants to get this done double-quick. No procurement. No lawyers. No meetings. No delays. I mean, in saying all of this, he sets a tone and makes his intentions clear.

MEISEL: I think it’s fair to say that it triggers a scramble amongst the civil servants to put his plan into action and pay out the grant money much faster than is normal.

CONNOLLY: Right. So, let’s hear three more excerpts from emails in the correspondence chain. Now, it’s the following day, and Matthew Gould sends a message which finds its way to a more junior civil servant.

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READER IN STUDIO: Monday 23rd March 2020 at 1544.

READER 2 IN STUDIO: My team can do this via the Department of Health and Social Care and have the money in place by tomorrow, but it will mean your team waiving the normal grant-giving process. I don’t want to do anything untoward, but given the Secretary of State’s and Dom Cummings’ strong steer, I’d really welcome your help/advice/green light. All the best, Matthew.

CONNOLLY: Further down the chain, said civil servant responds with this.

READER IN STUDIO: Monday 23rd March 2020 at 1929.

READER 2 IN STUDIO: Hi Matthew, Understand the need to act very quickly – we’ll aim to sort this early tomorrow, but we will need to do some, a proportionate amount of due diligence to avoid leaving the Accounting Officer overly exposed.

CONNOLLY: Then, more than 24 hours later, he’s back in touch with possible solutions.

READER IN STUDIO: Tuesday 24th March 2020 at 2105.

READER 2 IN STUDIO: Matthew, I need your help please to progress this to a point where there is enough air cover to justify a decision to proceed – after our team’s efforts over the past 24 hours, we don’t have enough yet. I think there are two ways forward …

CONNOLLY: The rest of his email to Matthew Gould sets out the bare minimum number of boxes that must be ticked if the grant is to be paid. Then the civil servant sets out means by which the grant could be paid. Now, this final email from our problem-solving civil servant to Matthew Gould is telling - and for obvious reasons.

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READER IN STUDIO: I’m sorry I couldn’t just ‘make this happen’, but I share your concern about doing anything untoward. Thanks.

CONNOLLY: Right, so we’ve heard the last of the emails in that chain. At this point, very important to say that, in the end, the grant wasn’t rushed through, because …

MEISEL: Because Our World in Data put the brake on.

CONNOLLY: That’s right.

MEISEL: It was all happening a little too fast, so they asked for more time to understand the implications of accepting Government money and to consult with their trustees. Max Roser, the founder and director of the project, told us that a full grant application was submitted on 25th March. This was followed by an agreement dated 30th April 2020, which included details on monitoring and reporting, agreed outputs and long- term outcomes. Mr Roser added that he had no way of knowing the internal processes inside the Government.

CONNOLLY: Of course. Now, we have also asked for an interview with Mr Hancock and Mr Gould to answer questions about how this grant was initially proposed to be paid, but a statement was sent in to us instead. In it, the Department of Health and Social Care told us they carried out due diligence and followed appropriate processes before this grant was awarded. They said they take these checks extremely seriously to ensure contracts deliver results and value for money, and they added the grant was later paid in a number of instalments, with the first not being processed until the summer of 2020.

MEISEL: That said, some of the people included in that email chain seemed uncomfortable with clearing a grant of that size, that quickly.

CONNOLLY: That’s right. So, here’s Peter Smith, a former Government commercial director and previously a senior adviser to the National Audit Office, to explain why that might have been the case.

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SMITH: The Government actually has its own very clear advice and rules on giving grants. You have to have a robust business case, so that simply is, why are you going to give a grant, how is it going to benefit the citizen and the taxpayer ultimately? And then the next step is you should generally, by default, run some sort of competitive process, just as you would if you were buying goods or services. And if you’re not going to actually compete, you’ve got to have very clear evidence as to why you’re doing that.

MUSIC

CONNOLLY: So, let’s tackle this then. First off, we know there was no competitive process for the grant we are discussing.

MEISEL: That’s right, and sometimes that is allowable if, for example, an organisation is the only provider in the market or where competition simply wouldn’t be appropriate. But the Government’s own guidance says that grants should be competed by default.

CONNOLLY: What’s more, we got hold of the Department’s internal guidance, which again says that directly awarding a grant without any form of competition is discouraged.

MEISEL: Also, the guidance is clear that all grants should be subject to timely and proportionate due diligence which, as we’ve heard from the emails, is an issue the civil servants along the email chain keep raising.

CONNOLLY: Okay, let’s throw to Peter Smith again for his take on this.

SMITH: Well, it’s quite clear that processes weren’t followed and it’s probably easier to think about whether any were followed. The attempt was to do it so quickly, clearly there was no time to do a proper due diligence. I mean, there was barely time to have a glance at the organisation’s accounts, I would have thought. Senior people were telling less senior people to give money to somebody. That’s not a business case. You - 10 -

SMITH cont: know, there should be some benefit coming back to the taxpayer because of that grant. The fact is, they were putting the senior people in Department of Health and elsewhere into a very difficult position. I think it was unethical, immoral really, and yes, it was an abuse of power.

CONNOLLY: There is no question that the pandemic was an emergency, certainly in the early stages. That warranted an urgent response and, in exceptional cases, additional powers. But is it right, proper and in keeping with best practice for very senior figures - namely Dominic Cummings and Matthew Gould - to try to get a grant for more than half a million pounds paid in 24 hours in the way those emails reveal? Jolyon Maughan is a QC and is director of the Good Law Project.

MAUGHAN: It’s a substantial sum of money, so the Government guidance talks about extra safeguards for sums above £100,000. This was well above £100,000. There was no process that I can see before the decision was made to award this very substantial sum.

CONNOLLY: Matthew Hancock does actually have the powers to award grants without competition. His powers are quite wide-ranging,

MAUGHAN: The powers given to ministers may on their face appear to be very broad, but they are invariably constrained by principles of what lawyers call sound public administration, which basically means for normal people, acting in ways that reflect that what is being spent is not banknotes from his personal wallet, but funds that belong to all of us and have to be spent properly. I think even worse than that is what the email chain reveals about the culture that’s predominating in Government at the time, where civil servants feel unable to do their job, which is securing that principles of good public administration are upheld in the handing out of substantial amounts of public money.

MUSIC

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CONNOLLY: We also spoke to a well-placed Whitehall source, who understands the intricacies of the grant-giving process and who is familiar with the contents of the email chain. Interestingly, they told us there was a further email sent to warn staff against sharing details of the confidential exchange that we’ve examined. An actor will say their words.

SOURCE: A member of the senior leadership team was being very explicit that people should not share this. In my view, that’s because it is so damaging to the NHSX. Dominic Cummings, Matt Hancock, everyone is just being very blatant that due process and procedures are being thrown out the window, when the whole country is going into national lockdown.

CONNOLLY: I also asked that source if the initial decision to pay Our World In Data the grant money was justified.

SOURCE: NHSX was already engaged with many organisations doing data science and modelling of the spread of Covid-19. So really, they offered nothing else to NHSX that wasn’t already being done there.

CONNOLLY: Our World In Data told us that their work had added value in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and their testing and vaccination pages have received around 65 million visitors, helping to inform people around the world on the evolution of the pandemic. We’ve also approached William Warr and Dominic Cummings for comment, but we’ve not heard back from either.

MUSIC

CONNOLLY: We’ve now heard a lot about NHSX, including some detail about its official remit - part of which is, by the way, the wholesale digitisation of the NHS’s many antiquated IT systems; a huge undertaking by any standards. But questions have previously surfaced about the level of transparency required of NHSX. Here’s senior correspondent with the Health Service Journal, Nicholas Carding.

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CARDING: I think it’s a fair assessment to say that they’re not a very transparent body. They are sort of a hybrid agency floating somewhere between the Department of Health and NHS England, but they’re not a statutory organisation, so they don’t actually have to publish anything - certainly not their accounts.

CONNOLLY: In November 2020, the Public Accounts Committee issued a report on Digital Transformation throughout the NHS, which placed operations at NHSX under the microscope.

BLAKE: We felt that, from the evidence that was given, that governance arrangements were very complicated and confused. We thought that it didn’t really seem to have a very obvious line of kind of accountability.

CONNOLLY: Olivia Blake is a Labour MP for Sheffield and is a member of the Public Accounts Committee that looked into NHSX.

BLAKE: It’s quite clear that there are huge amounts of money needed to be invested through the digital transformation programme. We were trying to push at the issue of making sure that it’s quite clear that we’re getting value for money on this and making sure that the departments involved can get assurance from whether it’s NHS Digital or NHS X, that the money is being well spent. And at the moment, it’s quite clouded and quite difficult to see that.

CONNOLLY: In May 2020, a National Audit Office report warned that unless improvements are made, the Department of Health and Social Care and its arms- length bodies, including NHSX, are unlikely to achieve value for money for the up to £8.1 billion they estimate will be spent on digital transformation by 2024. But the publicly available accounts don’t make clear how much of that £8.1 billion is controlled directly by NHSX. In a statement, the Department of Health and Social Care told us:

READER IN STUDIO: NHSX has previously featured and will continue to feature as part of the annual reports of NHS England, NHS Improvement and the Department of Health and Social Care. And later this summer, NHSX will also publish an annual report

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READER IN STUDIO cont: on its activity for the period 2020-21 and each year thereafter, updating on its progress and spending on digital transformation in the system.

MUSIC AND APPLAUSE

EXTRACT FROM BABYLON HEALTH PROMOTIONAL VIDEO

HANCOCK: There is no reason in the world why the UK cannot be the leading health-tech nation.

CONNOLLY: You might recognise the voice.

HANCOCK: We’ve got amazing universities, we’ve got an amazing private health-tech start-up eco-system, we have an amazing healthcare system in the NHS.

MUSIC

CONNOLLY: This is a corporate video promoting a tech firm that specialises in health, and this is a cameo appearance. Quick clue - if you think it’s an actor or a musician or the likes, you’re off the mark. Have another listen.

HANCOCK: And the three of those are going to work together to harness the very best technology on the planet to build this country into the best health-tech nation on earth. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]

CONNOLLY: Remarkably, that’s the voice of Matt Hancock, the Health Minister. And I say ‘remarkably’ because the speech you just heard was delivered at the Chelsea offices of a company called Babylon Health in September of 2018 - and it later ended up in one of the company’s promotional videos. And there were other occasions when Matt Hancock praised the organisation, including in newspaper articles. But before we get to that, we need first to understand what Babylon does.

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ACTUALITY OF VIDEO CALL

APPLEBEE: Hi, so I’m Doctor Applebee. I don’t know that we’ve actually met in the past, have we?

PATIENT: I don’t think so …

CONNOLLY: I’m in Tower Hamlets, East London. I’ve come to meet Dr Jackie Applebee at the GP surgery where she works. She’s on a video conferencing call with a patient who happens to be on the bus at the time, and who has a rash on her thigh.

APPLEBEE: But of course, in this brave new world now you can be on the bus while you’re seeing the doctor, which is great. So, thanks for your message. So, I can see that you saw one of my colleagues last week, or sent a photo in, and you had some treatment which hasn’t actually worked for you.

PATIENT: Yeah, it hasn’t really, it’s got bigger, to be fair. It’s not as red, but it’s got bigger.

CONNOLLY: Babylon Health was founded in 2013 by Ali Parsa, a British Iranian entrepreneur and former investment banker. The company offers tech savvy customers access to healthcare via digital platforms - like on their phone, for example. And in 2017, the company launched GP at Hand, an innovative app-based service, which allowed users to book video conferencing appointments with NHS GPs. Back then, most practices, including the one I’m in today, were still years away from adopting that kind of technology. So, how long have you been using video conferencing now?

APPLEBEE: Since about April last year. So, yeah, about 14 months.

CONNOLLY: How do you find it? What do you make of it?

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APPLEBEE: It’s okay. It’s got its place. I’d much prefer to see patients face to face, but it does have its place and it’s more convenient for patients sometimes.

CONNOLLY: By the way, the video conferencing software Dr Applebee uses in her day to day role as a GP isn’t provided by Babylon. She is the chair of Doctors in Unite, a trade union and, over the years, has been vocal in her opposition to privately owned companies, those such as Babylon, being allowed to operate under the NHS banner. Babylon has come under fire from her and from other GPs in London and further afield. So, I ask if that criticism is, in part, driven by a reluctance to adapt and embrace technology.

APPLEBEE: I think we probably were reluctant to take it on, but NHS IT, it’s notoriously appalling. It’s so slow. If they want us to do things, you know, digitally then we need to have the kit to do it. And even now it can be a real struggle. I mean, things crash all the time.

CONNOLLY: A reluctance to take on new tech also had unintended consequences when it came to the impact of the GP At Hand app. Dr Applebee tells me that the service impacted doctors’ surgeries within the areas in which it was allowed to register patients.

APPLEBEE: What really upset me about GP At Hand and Babylon was that they were essentially cherry-picking people who could use video conferencing, who are comfortable with it, and if you look at the demographic of their patients, they’re all sort of between the ages of about 20 and 40. They weren’t really seeing people face to face very much at all. Anything more complex was really being sort of pushed back to more traditional GPs.

CONNOLLY: There was tension between traditional GP practices and the new virtual, pocket-based service. Those GPs were concerned about skewing toward the older, iller population, but Babylon and their partner GPs say older patients attract a higher payment, so the payments for users of the app are, on average, lower.

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ACTUALITY IN PARLIAMENT

SLAUGHTER: Is the Secretary of State familiar with the GP At Hand online service? It is a partnership between a private company and a Fulham GP surgery which has poached thousands of profitable patients from GPs all over London, to the alarm of the BMA and GPs generally.

CONNOLLY: That’s Labour MP Andy Slaughter, in Parliament on July 24th 2018, tackling the Health Minister on the issues that we’ve just outlined. And here’s is Mr Hancock’s response.

HANCOCK: I am a user of the Babylon service myself - they are my GP. Now the important thing here is to make sure that the rules keep up to date so that we can get the benefits of the new technology, but make sure that it works in a way that ensures everybody gets high quality primary care.

MUSIC

CONNOLLY: On September 13th 2018, the Health Minister told the Daily Telegraph that, ‘GP at Hand is revolutionary. It works brilliantly for so many patients and goes with the grain of how people access modern services.’ And the icing on the cake - on November 27th 2018, Matthew Hancock praised GP At Hand in an interview he gave to the Evening Standard newspaper. The article appeared in a supplement paid for by Babylon. By combing through complex company records, this programme has uncovered evidence that another company, a major shareholder in Babylon, made a significant donation to the Tory party just three weeks before Matt Hancock made that statement in Parliament. Now, the donation was disclosed by the Conservative Party as per the rules, but the fact the money was coming from a Babylon shareholder isn’t apparent from the information published by the Electoral Commission. Anna, this programme’s producer, is back with me to help unpick the details. So, Anna, we’re looking at a shareholding in Babylon Holdings - the parent company to Babylon Healthcare Services, which runs the organisation’s UK arm, yeah?

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MUSIC

MEISEL: Yeah, and it leads us to Mr Nassef Sawiris. He’s an Egyptian businessman and a billionaire. Now, Mr Sawiris has a company, and in the relevant period that company was a significant shareholder in Babylon Holdings. But this isn’t the only company Mr Sawiris controls. He is also the ultimate controlling party of a company called OCI UK Ltd.

CONNOLLY: So, it’s his company really then?

MEISEL: Yes - and here’s where it gets really interesting. So, in April of 2017, OCI made a donation of £50,000 to the Tory party. And then, crucially, the company made another donation of £150,000 on 2nd July 2018, just three weeks before Matt Hancock mentioned GP At Hand in Parliament.

CONNOLLY: To be clear then, just to recap very briefly, Mr Sawiris has ultimate controlling interest in the two companies we’re discussing. One holds shares in Babylon, but the donation was made through the other company, OCI, that’s right?

MEISEL: Uh huh.

CONNOLLY: Now Nassef Sawiris hasn’t broken any rules - and, of course, shareholders of companies are absolutely free to make political donations, we know that. On the Babylon side, the CEO, Ali Parsa, told us his company’s innovative service is the reason for its success and it has led to praise and interest from politicians, including those in Government. He went on further, he said Babylon has never made nor benefited from political donations, nor have they benefited from special treatment, and there is no basis to attribute political donations by third parties to their achievements. He added that neither he nor his organisation has control or knowledge over private donations made by individual shareholders. So, Anna, let’s get to what the potential issues are with this particular situation.

MEISEL: The issue is with Matt Hancock. Did he know that a shareholder of the company he was so enthusiastically promoting had made sizeable donations to the Tory party? And if not, should he have made it his business to find that out? - 18 -

CONNOLLY: Well, that is the question. Now, we and our partners in this investigation did manage to find the connection because we were very curious to see who the shareholders of Babylon were, and so we did some digging, we went to the Companies Registry in Jersey, paid a fee and obtained the shareholders’ register that way.

MEISEL: Yes.

CONNOLLY: Let’s put this all of this into context then. Here is Daniel Bruce, he’s Chief Executive of the NGO Transparency International UK.

BRUCE: Look, democracy isn’t supposed to be like this. Ultimately, we, the public, the electorate, need to have absolute confidence that that line between the public interest and the private commercial interest doesn’t get dangerously blurred. And the examples that you’re referring to in this particular case adds to, unfortunately, what appears to be a growing trend of that line getting blurred in recent years, which is not in the public interest.

CONNOLLY: Next, Sir Alistair Graham. He was Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life from 2004 to 2007, and I asked what he thought of the complexities of what we uncovered.

GRAHAM: Well, there’s certainly sufficient worrying evidence of this lack of transparency to warrant a substantial investigation about, particularly, how the rules around transparency could be improved, because if we have a situation where people are making donations via other companies, then how can we be satisfied that there’s not a perception of a conflict of interest between the policy that the Health Secretary is pursuing and the demands of the general good? Transparency is really crucial to standards in public life and a failure to explain those relationships, I think, was unfortunate.

CONNOLLY: As it stands, the system is set up in such a way that the information we unearthed about shares and shareholders in companies who make political donations isn’t captured or recorded centrally. Granted, it involves huge volumes of information that would need to be retrieved and logged. But nonetheless, it raises questions

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CONNOLLY cont: about what kinds of information should be made available to ensure the public can have faith in the system and the people entrusted to marshal it. Sir Alistair Graham again.

GRAHAM: Well, there’s always a lot of argument about interpreting the Ministerial Code, but it does embody the Seven Principles of Public Life, and I think there are three principles. First of all is the principle of integrity, where the last sentence describing the integrity principle says, ‘They must declare any interests and relationships.’ Well, while promoting Babylon, we never had any of these relationships explained to us, I don’t think, at any stage, either inside or outside of Parliament. The second principle is accountability, which puts an enormous emphasis on the importance of transparency. And the final principle is leadership, where people like Cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister are expected to show leadership in applying the principles for public life which are built into the Ministerial Code, and this would seem to me a fairly massive failure of transparency and therefore a failure of applying the principles that we expect ministers to do. This is why there should be an investigation by the appropriate parliamentary watchdogs so that we can get to the bottom of this.

CONNOLLY: Daniel Bruce agrees that transparency is crucial in situations such as this.

BRUCE: This should be profoundly important for every citizen, to be absolutely confident that the people that we have elected to run our country and our public affairs are solely acting in the public interest. When you get into a situation where the lines become blurred around who is influencing who, and who might possibly owe somebody else a favour, then you reasonably start to question whether decisions are being made wholly in the public interest.

MUSIC

CONNOLLY: Matt Hancock declined to take part in this programme, but in the course of our research we were told that given he supports digital innovation, it’s not surprising that he talks about NHS services. The DHSC rejects suggestions regarding the

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CONNOLLY cont: Ministerial Code. We were also told that Matt Hancock doesn’t know Mr Sawiris and he hasn’t been lobbied by him. We also tried to interview a number of Tory MPs in relation to what this investigation has found out. None of them would take part or offer comment of any kind. The issues and concerns raised in this programme, and across the coverage produced by our partners in this joint investigation, point, in the main, to one unassailable truth. If taxpayers and voters are to have confidence in the system, it needs to better capture some of the complex links and connections which, as it stands, aren’t easy to uncover.