DOMINIC Cummings has said that reports he received a huge pay rise during the pandemic were wrong, instead insisting the extra cash had been a reversal of a pay cut.
In an evidence session with the Commons Science and Technology Committee, Boris Johnson’s former top adviser also levelled explosive allegations against Matt Hancock’s Department of Health, and outlined the conditions he had given Johnson in exchange for his help in Downing Street.
Speaking in front of MPs, Cummings said he had “interfered with the pay system” in order to take less money than he had been offered.
He said: “The media reports about me getting a pay rise after Covid are wrong.
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“It is true that I interfered with the pay system, regarding my own pay. But that was in summer 2019, when I arrived I was put on the normal pay band for my position of 140 something thousand.
“I said that I didn’t want that, I only wanted to be paid what I was paid at Vote Leave.
"I figured that I should be paid the same for trying to sort out the Brexit mess as I’d been paid for doing Vote Leave so I asked for a pay cut, which is what happened in summer 2019.
“For some reason this has appeared in the media as if I got a pay rise after Covid. But that didn’t happen.
"When we were all rehired the day after the [2019 general] election, then I moved back onto the normal pay grade for my position.”
Reports at the time relied on Cabinet Office figures which showed Cummings's pay had risen during 2020 from between £95,000-£99,999 to £140,000-£144,999.
Cummings, who stepped down as Johnson’s chief adviser late in 2020, also said that the UK’s vaccine procurement had had to be taken out of Matt Hancock’s hands after his department’s failures in obtaining PPE early in the Covid pandemic.
He said the Department of Health had a “total disaster in how it buys and how it procures”.
“It is not coincidental that we had to take [vaccine procurement] out of the Department of Health. We had to have it authorised very directly by the Prime Minister,” he said.
“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."
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Cummings claimed the government had seen the EU vaccination programme and decided it was "guaranteed to fail .. a debacle".
“Therefore [Chief Scientific Adviser] Patrick Vallance, the Cabinet Secretary [Mark Sedwill], 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’.”
At the evidence session this morning, Cummings also outlined a meeting he had had in his living room with Johnson before he became the Prime Minister.
He said he had laid out conditions which would have to be met if he were to join the Downing Street team, and Johnson had quickly agreed.
Cummings told MPs: “The Prime Minister came to me the Sunday before he became Prime Minister and said would I come into Downing Street to try and sort out the huge Brexit nightmare.
“I said yes, if first of all you’re deadly serious about actually getting Brexit done and avoiding a second referendum.
“Secondly, double the science budget.
“Third, create some Arpa-like [the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the US] entity, and fourth support me in trying to change how Whitehall works and how the Cabinet Office works because it’s a disaster zone. He said: ‘Deal’.”
Arpa became Darpa in 1972 when “Defense” was added to its name, but it is the organisation in the 1960s which Cummings was eager to have the Government imitate.
Cummings hoped to see a high risk, high reward approach at the UK’s Arpa which would potentially see millions lost to failed technological gambits, but return much more on the few which paid off.
The former special advisor told the committee the 1960s Arpa model was “so incredibly fruitful that a few hundred million dollars generates tens of trillions of dollars in value with the internet and the personal computer revolution”.
He said the bureaucracy in government is contrary to how Arpa’s success had happened, and so the new agency had to be low in red tape.
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The UK Government announced the launch of its Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) in February 2021, saying it will be led by scientists who will have “the freedom to identify and fund transformational science and technology at speed”.
Asked why setting up Aria had itself been apparently mired in bureaucracy, Cummings said they had been “like everyone else in politics, swamped by the Brexit problem”.
He said he had been working on science funding in January 2020 but then found “everything kind of swept away for a few months in the first wave of Covid”.
In 2019, the Conservatives said they would double public funding in research and development, bringing it to £18 billion by 2024–25.
In March 2020, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said the government would be more aggressive, raising that figure to £22 billion.
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