Matt Hancock acted unlawfully over Covid contract details, High Court judge rules

Public entitled to see who received ‘vast’ sums for PPE contracts

Health secretary Matt Hancock acted unlawfully by handing out coronavirus contracts without publishing details in a timely way, a High Court judge has ruled.

Mr Justice Chamberlain was ruling on a legal challenge brought by three opposition MPs and the Good Law Project over contracts running into hundreds of millions of pounds to supply face masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE), which were awarded without competition.

He found that Mr Hancock should have complied with government transparency principles requiring the publication of details of contracts within 30 days. And he said in his ruling that the health secretary had spent £207,000 of taxpayers’ money fighting the case.

The Department of Health insisted it had been working “on very short timescales and against a background of unparalleled global demand” to deliver PPE to the healthcare front line and was publishing details about contracts awarded “as soon as possible”.

A ruling released by the High Court found: “There is now no dispute that, in a substantial number of cases, the secretary of state breached his legal obligation to publish Contract Award Notices (CANs) within 30 days of the award of contracts.” 

The ruling also stated: “The secretary of state spent vast quantities of public money on pandemic-related procurements during 2020. The public were entitled to see who this money was going to, what it was being spent on and how the relevant contracts were awarded.”

The judge said that if government had complied with its legal obligations, anyone concerned “would have been able to scrutinise CANs and contract provisions, ask questions about them and raise any issues with oversight bodies”.

The Good Law Project and MPs Debbie Abrahams (Labour), Caroline Lucas (Green) and Layla Moran (Lib Dem) brought the judicial review in relation to contracts worth £252m to Ayanda Capital, £108m to Clandeboye Agencies and £313m to Pestfix in April last year.

They said that Ayanda was a tiny company created by an associate of a minister which had been given preferential “VIP lane” treatment in award of the contract, and that £160m worth of the masks provided were unusable.

Clandeboye had only previously supplied confectionary, while Pestfix - which also benefited from the VIP lane - had never before supplied medical PPE, they said.

The ruling said it was clear that the time limit for publishing contracts was breached in “a significant number of cases”.

But the judge declined to order Mr Hancock to publish all remaining contracts, noting that the backlog was already being cleared and he was “moving close to complete compliance”.

In a statement released following the judgement, the Good Law Project, led by barrister Jolyon Maugham, said: “When government eschews transparency, it evades accountability.

“Government’s behaviour came under criticism in the judgment.

“If it had admitted to being in breach of the law when we first raised our concerns, it would have never been necessary to take this judicial review to its conclusion. Instead, they chose a path of obfuscation, racking up over £200,000 of legal costs as a result.

“We shouldn’t be forced to rely on litigation to keep those in power honest, but in this case, it’s clear that our challenge pushed government to comply with its legal obligations.

“Judge Chamberlain stated that the admission of breach by government was ‘secured as a result of this litigation and at a late stage of it’ and ‘I have no doubt that this claim has speeded up compliance’.

“It begs the question, if we hadn’t brought this legal challenge, what other contract details would have remained hidden from view?”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We have been working tirelessly to deliver what is needed to protect our health and social care staff throughout this pandemic, within very short timescales and against a background of unparalleled global demand.

“This has often meant having to award contracts at speed to secure the vital supplies required to protect NHS workers and the public.

“As the 2020 National Audit Office report recognised, all of the NHS providers audited were always able to get what they needed in time thanks to the effort of government, NHS, armed forces, civil servants and industry who delivered over eight billion items of PPE to the frontline at record speed.

“We fully recognise the importance of transparency in the award of public contracts and continue to publish information about contracts awarded as soon as possible.”