“File on 4” – “Contracts of Interest”
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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. - 3 - 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. - 4 - 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. - 5 - 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 - 6 - 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.