Dominic Cummings claims UK’s Covid response held back by EU

Giving evidence to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, he said the vaccination programme had only been a success because it was taken out of the hands of civil servants and given to a newly created taskforce.

“As the country emerges from lockdown there should be an urgent, very, very hard look by this building (parliament) at what went wrong and why in 2020,” he said.

“One of the most obvious lessons of that is the incredible value potentially in getting science and technology stuff right (and) the disaster that can come if you don’t get it right.”

Cummings, a long-standing critic of the Civil Service, also said that when the pandemic struck the UK last year, there had not a single entity capable of making decisions at “scale and pace” when it came to funding the science.

He said that one of the key lessons to come out of the crisis was the need to go to “extreme lengths to try to de-bureaucratise the normal system”.

“In February, March, April last year there was no entity in the British state, zero entities, including the prime minister himself, who could make rapid decisions on science funding minus horrific EU procurement, state aid etc, etc laws,” he said.

“No entity in the British state that could operate at scale and at pace and that was obviously disastrous.”

He said that when it came to the vaccination programme, he and the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance had urged Johnson to create a dedicated taskforce.

“In spring 2020 you had a situation where the Department of Health was just a smoking ruin in terms of procurement and PPE and all of that.

“You had serious problems with the funding bureaucracy for therapeutics.

“We also had the EU proposal which looked like an absolute guaranteed programme to fail – a debacle.

“Therefore Patrick Vallance, the cabinet secretary, me and some others said ‘Obviously we should take this out of the Department of Health, obviously we should create a separate taskforce and obviously we have to empower that taskforce directly with the authority of the prime minister’.”

Downing Street defended the response of the DHSC to the pandemic pointing to its achievement in establishing “one of the biggest diagnostic networks in UK history”.

“Covid challenged health systems around the world,” the prime minister’s official spokesman said.

“We have procured over nine million items of PPE, we have established the NHS Test and Trace system which has contacted millions of people and asked them to isolate.

“DH and the NHS were central to the rollout of the vaccination programme.”

The prime minister’s press secretary Allegra Stratton, whose appointment reportedly sparked the row which led to Cummings’ departure, added: “Dominic Cummings was a valued member of the prime minister’s staff.

“He was the chief of staff, he was an enormously important player in the prime minister’s team and what he chooses to do is his business.”

Health secretary Matt Hancock refused to be drawn on the matter during Wednesday’s press conference, saying the vaccination rollout had been a “huge team effort”.

He said: “It’s been an awful lot of people pulling together to make it happen.”

In his evidence, Cummings said that the pandemic had underlined the need for an independent agency to fund innovative scientific research which he had been working on before he was ousted from No 10.

Under government plans the Advanced Research & Invention Agency (Aria) will have a £800 million budget to invest in “high risk, high reward” projects.

Cummings said that if it was to be a success it would need “extreme freedom” to act, stripping out all the “horrific bureaucracy” around Whitehall procurement and Treasury rules.

“It should be going off to people on the far edges of the science world and talking to them about what is really valuable,” he said.