Claims that Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock acted unlawfully by appointing their “chums” to three top jobs in the fight against Covid-19 – without opening the processes to competition – are to be the subject of an official legal challenge in the high court. Campaigners won an initial victory in the case last Thursday, when Mr Justice Swift granted their applications for a judicial review. In court, they will argue that the prime minister and the health secretary broke the rules and acted in a discriminatory way, running a “chumocracy” at the top of government. The case, brought jointly by the Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading race equality thinktank, and the Good Law Project, concerns three crucial appointments made at the height of the Covid-19 crisis. These were Dido Harding, the Tory peer, as the head of NHS Test and Trace, Kate Bingham as the head of the UK’s vaccine task force, and Mike Coupe as director of testing at NHS Test and Trace. While the government is likely to say it made the appointments in great haste at time of national emergency, the claimants will counter that all three were installed at least partly because of their Tory connections, and not solely on merit. Harding and Bingham are both married to Conservative MPs while Coupe is a former chief executive of Sainsbury’s, and was a colleague of Harding’s at the supermarket chain. At the heart of the claimants’ case is the charge that the posts were not advertised in the way they normally are in the public sector, so those with wide experience in the field were not able to put themselves forward. They also point out that because all are unpaid positions, the government was guilty of indirectly discriminating against others outside the well-off, predominantly white group from which the three were chosen. In a separate case brought by the Good Law Project, the high court ruled last month that Hancock had acted unlawfully by failing to publish multibillion-pound Covid-19 government contracts within the 30-day period required by law. Research by the procurement consultancy Tussell had found that Hancock’s Department of Health and Social Care had spent about £15bn buying PPE from different companies by the beginning of October, but that only £2.68bn-worth of contracts had been published.
Government regulations require all contracts with a value of more than £10,000 to be published, and to be sent for publication within 30 days of being awarded. The test and trace system run by Harding has been widely criticised for being ineffective and wasteful. By contrast Bingham has been widely praised over recent months for her role in the UK’s successful vaccination programme. Despite this, the claimants suggest it was not her experience in the field that led to her appointment but rather the fact that she is married to Jesse Norman, a Tory minister who had been a contemporary of the prime minister’s at Eton. While the claimants have stressed that at no stage have they sought to remove any of the three from their posts, they say they are acting to ensure that future governments are bound to act fairly and lawfully in making public appointments. Welcoming the order by Mr Justice Swift to hold a judicial review, Dr Halima Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust, said: “This government has undermined checks and balances throughout the pandemic, not just in terms of the award of jobs to cronies but the vast sums of public money handed out to its friends without proper scrutiny.
“Action must be taken if we wish to ensure that the principle of transparency is not damaged permanently, and that this government and future administrations can be held to account for what might appear to constitute unregulated nepotism. “I can name numerous senior BAME administrators in the NHS, with decades of experience in public health under their belt who, had they been considered for the role, were perfectly qualified to do Harding’s job competently.” Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, said: “The story we tell ourselves is that things like this don’t happen here. That the handing out of important roles to friends, without competition, is something for abroad. But the pandemic has exposed that story as a fairytale. Britain is a ‘chumocracy’ where having the right friends matters more than having the right skills. We believe this is discriminatory – and not the Britain we should be.” Mr Justice Swift said in granting the judicial review that the claimants’ case “merits consideration at a full hearing” but noted that there are elements of the case that they may find difficult to sustain, including that the goverrment’s behaviour in these cases was evidence of similar failings over a prolonged period of time. A spokesman said No 10 did not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.