Matt Hancock says he is ‘profoundly sorry’ for ‘huge error’ in UK’s pandemic planning – UK politics live

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Matt Hancock was confronted by bereaved family members, including one dressed as the Grim Reaper, as he left the Covid inquiry, PA Media reports. PA says:

Charles Persinger, 58, lost his wife and his mother to coronavirus, one month apart.

His mother, Susan Persinger, died in January 2021 aged 74, while his wife. Katie Persinger, a care home manager, died in February 2021 aged 51.

As Hancock got into his car, Persinger, dressed as the Grim Reaper, shouted sarcastically after him: “I’m a big fan of your work.”

Daniel Korski, one of the three Conservatives still in the contest to the party’s candidate for London mayor, has issued a statement describing as “baseless” the claim that he groped a TV producer when he was working in Downing Street 10 years ago.

As Ben Quinn and Aubrey Allegretti report, the Conservative party has said it will not investigate the claim.

Liz Kendall, the shadow social care minister, says Matt Hancock’s evidence to the Covid inquiry showed the Tories had “totally neglected” social care for 13 years.

Matt Hancock admitted that the Conservatives have totally neglected social care for 13 years. If you don’t know how many care homes there are in the country you’re supposed to be governing, you can’t ensure people receive the care they need.

His apology will provide little comfort to the 43,000 families who lost loved ones to Covid in care homes.

Labour would ensure that adult social care is stabilised for the future, with record vacancies tackled through a new deal for care workers and a long-term plan of investment and reform, so that lessons are learned and society’s most vulnerable are never left so exposed again.

In his evidence to the inquiry this morning Hancock said that before the pandemic the Department of Health and Social Care was lacking basic data about the sector. He went on: “For instance, how many care homes are operating right now in the UK – that was a fact that we did not know at that time and I’m glad to say now there’s far better data.”

Hancock said that one problem was that, while he was in charge of social care policy as health and social care secretary, delivering social care was a matter for local authorities.

At another point Hugo Keith KC, counsel for the inquiry, asked Hancock if he could say the adult social care sector was well prepared for a pandemic “when the department had no means of finding out whether or not they had the right plans in place, whether local authorities had planned sufficiently, let alone how many numbers were in the care sector.”

Hancock replied: “No, it was terrible.”

James Bethell is a close friend of Matt Hancock’s and served as a junior health minister in his department during Covid. He agrees with the main argument his former boss was making. (See 10.42am and 11.34am.)

Keir Starmer has also claimed that some of the language used by Rishi Sunak about the cost of living crisis has been “extraordinary”.

Speaking at the New Statesman’s Politics Live conference this morning, Starmer said:

Some of the language he has used in the last week has been extraordinary: ‘I’m on it’, ‘Hold your nerve’, or recently telling the country to ‘understand the economic context’.

The idea that people who are struggling every day do not understand the economic context they are in is, frankly, real evidence of how out of touch he is.

Sunak urged people to hold their nerve in a tweet on Monday, and later the same day he said, with regard to the battle against inflation, he was “totally, 100% on it”. Talking about inflation, he has also repeatedly argued that this is a global problem, as he did at PMQs last week, and again in his interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg at the weekend.

At the New Statesman event, Starmer said he was not criticising Sunak for being wealthy. But he said his own working-class upbringing meant he had a better understanding than the PM did of what it means to struggle with the cost of living. He said:

We holidayed here. We never went abroad. We didn’t really eat out very much. It’s not a sob story, it’s a story of what it’s like to grow up working class, but more importantly, it gave me an insight into respect and dignity.

There were times where we couldn’t pay all the bills and we had to decide what we wouldn’t have any more… That is a feeling of anxiety but also shame, of not being able to do something. I don’t think [Sunak’s] been in that position.

Zo? Gr?newald at the New Statesman has a full write-up of what Starmer said here.

Keir Starmer has refused to commit a future Labour government to always accepting recommendations from public sector pay bodies, PA Media reports.

Speaking at the New Statesman’s Politics Live conference this morning, Starmer said Labour would have to “go at pace” to “repair and rebuild” the country’s finances but stressed that the “strong fiscal rules of the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, could not be broken when paying for public sector improvements, PA reports.

Asked about his stance on public sector pay recommendations, Starmer said:

The first thing about public sector pay is we need to understand why people want their wages to go up because, for most people, their wages haven’t gone up in material terms for 13 years. And if your wages haven’t gone up in material terms but every bill has gone up, there is a real squeeze on. The failure to grow the economy, and the additional damage that Liz Truss did, is the cause of that.

But I’m not going to hide from this. If we are privileged enough to come into power at the next election … we’re going to inherit a real mess – a very badly damaged economy, public services that aren’t on their knees but are on their face, the NHS in particular.

And a sense that we’ve got to go at pace to try and repair and rebuild, and run towards the future which is available for us as a country.

And Rachel’s been clear that that will require us to have strong fiscal rules which we’re not going to break. But we urgently need to get on with the task now of picking the country up, rebuilding and moving forwards.

At cabinet this morning the main discussion was about the NHS, and the long-term workforce plan being published later this week. In a readout of what was said, No 10 told journalists:

As part of the government’s commitment to cut waiting lists and ensure the health service thrives for another 75 years, the prime minister said we would publish the first ever NHS Long Term Workforce Plan ahead of next week’s anniversary.

He said the plan was not just simply about training more doctors and nurses, it would also set out how the NHS will retain more clinicians and reform how it works to match the areas of highest demand and learn from approaches in other countries.

He said this plan was written by the NHS, it was what staff have called for and it was an example of the government doing the right thing for the long term – not just the here and now.

Here is some Twitter comment on Matt Hancock’s evidence to the Covid inquiry.

From Prof Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University

From my colleague Peter Walker

From Tom Harwood from GB News

From my colleague John Crace

From the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, an outspoken critic of lockdown policies

Nurses in England have failed to vote in sufficient numbers for further strike action, Rachel Hall reports.

Wetherby has finished. Hugo Keith KC gets up.

He says the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group have sent an email on the basis of something Hancock said earlier. Hancock said Covid-19 was the first coronavirus that could be transmitted asymptomatically. Keith says the group have said that that was wrong, and that Mers (Middle East respiratory syndrome) and Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) could also be transmitted asymptomatically.

Hancock does not contest this. But he says that the advice about coronavirus and asymptomatic transmission was vital to decisions taken early in the pandemic.

And that’s it. His evidence is over.

Pete Wetherby KC, counsel for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, is now asking questions. He asks about various legal measures in place before the pandemic started.

Hancock says he agrees with the general point, which is that the government should have been prepared for lockdown.

This is from ITV’s Robert Peston, seems a reliable bet, based on the evidence already given to the inquiry.

Keith is on his final question.

Q: Why did no pandemic planning paper pay any attention to the impact of a pandemic on the vulnerable, on ethnic minority groups, or on other groups affected by health inequalities? No thought was given to the impact of measures on these groups.

Hancock says, when he appointed Chris Whitty as chief medical officer, it was understanding that health inequalities would be at the top of his agenda.

He says the medical impacts were covered by the plan.

As for the social impacts, he says the assumption that you are not going to stop a pandemic implies the most vulnerable will be hit hardest.

There are costs of lockdown. If the impact of a virus is going to be worse, you have to hit it hard, “and very, very early”.

Q: No consideration was given to the needs of the most vulnerable.

Hancock says consideration was given on a clinical basis, but not on a socioeconomic basis.

Q: “Lions led by structural donkeys. Personally everyone gave their all, but the system was not fit for purpose.”

Hancock says that is “absolutely right”. But he says that was a problem across the world, and it went back a long way.

Hancock says no government would deploy its entire army on a single day.

But, with health, the entire resources of the NHS are used every day.

This means it does not have resilience in a crisis, he says.

He says other countries, which spent more on health and have more capacity, are better prepared.

But this would require a “huge increase in the already very, very large NHS budget”, he says.

Hancock says the government started buying PPE in January 2020. But the problems with the stockpile were “very significant”, he says. He says this will be covered in more detail in the next module.

He says there should be a legal requirement on health providers to hold a certain amount of PPE.

Setting up supply chains in short order is very hard, he says.

Keith mentions the need for mass diagnositic testing.

“Yes, terrible,” says Hancock, in what seems to be a reference to the UK’s testing capacity.

Keith mentions the need for mass contact tracing.

Hancock accepts that there was “no such thing” in place.

Hancock says, in the 18 months before the pandemic started, he was never asked to appear at that national security council to talk about pandemic planning.

Q: Do you agree ministers need training in how to deal with civil contingencies?

Yes, says Hancock. He says he was in the process of setting up a scheme for training like that, with the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, when Covid struck. But Covid meant that had to stop.

Q: Do you think there should be a minister in sole charge of resilience, as Oliver Letwin recommended?

Yes, says Hancock. He says they would not necessarily have to be in cabinet. But they would need to have the ear of the PM.

He says the UK now has the UK Health Security Agency. He says the person in charge (currently Dame Jenny Harries) should wake up every morning worrying about the next pandemic.

We now, once again, have a body whose sole responsibility is preparing Britain to be resilient to health external health threats.

I want Jenny Harries and whoever’s in her job to wake up every morning worrying about the next pandemic and what needs to be put in place.

You can of course supplement that with better resilience training at the centre as well. But you mustn’t take away from the real burning accountability of the person in that job.

He says the UK spends ?53bn on defence. But the budget for UKHSA is just ?450m, even though more than 220,000 people died from Covid.

That is less than 1% of the defence budget, he says. He says spending so little on the body in charge of pandemic planning is “completely indefensible”.