MATT Hancock has denied Dominic Cummings’ claims of incompetence during a grilling by MPs in the House of Commons.
The Health Secretary was accused of repeatedly lying by the Prime Minister’s former aide during his seven-hour marathon evidence session yesterday to the Covid-19 Select Committee.
Hancock was forced to appear before the Commons this morning to refute the claims and said they were “unsubstantiated allegations”.
Cummings had not only accused Hancock of lying but said he should have been sacked on 15 to 20 occasions, and that Mark Sedwill, Whitehall’s top mandarin at the time, had “lost confidence in the Secretary of State’s honesty”.
Labour’s shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth had tabled the urgent question, where he highlighted the “grave and serious” allegations made by Cummings.
In response Hancock said: “These allegations that were put yesterday – and repeated by [Ashworth] – are serious allegations and I welcome the opportunity to come to the House to put formally on the record that these unsubstantiated allegations around honesty are not true.
“I’ve been straight with people in public and in private throughout.
“Every day since I began working on the response to this pandemic last January, I’ve got up each morning and asked ‘What must I do to protect life?’
“That is the job of the Health Secretary in a pandemic.
“We’ve taken an approach of openness, transparency and explanation of both what we know and of what we don’t know.”
However, Hancock didn’t respond in any details to the allegations.
SNP health spokesperson Martyn Day probed Hancock on the allegations. He said: “In Dominic Cummings' opening statement yesterday he said that the truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisors, fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this when the public need us most we failed.
“We then heard a litany of evidence that the disease wasn’t taken seriously in February last year, further compounded by the ignoring of Sage advice in September to lock down and resulting in a worse second wave.
READ MORE: Six of the weirdest moments from Dominic Cummings’ evidence session
“Does the Health Secretary agree that the UK Government failed the public? And had he acted sooner how many lives could have been saved or restrictions could have been avoided? Will he act urgently to prevent further unnecessary suffering and death in our immediate future by holiding a comprehensive public inquiry immediately?”
The Health Secretary replied, but did not answer any specific allegations and turned to the vaccine instead.
Hancock said: “I’ve been working on this pandemic since January of last year, that’s when we began work, before the disease was even evident in this country, that’s when we kicked off work on the vaccine. I was told at first it typically takes five years to develop a vaccine, and I insisted we drove at that as fast as we possibly could and I’m delighted at the progress on that that we’ve been able to make.
“Of course it is right that we learn from everything that we understand and everything that we see and all of the scientific advances, we should do it all the way through, the idea that we should wait for inquiry in order to learn is wrong. But ofcourse it's also right that at the appropriate time we go through all that happened in order to ensure that we’re as best prepared for the inevitable pandemics of the future.”
Cummings accused Hancock of making a “stupid” public pledge to increase testing to 100,000 by the end of April 2020, claiming he then interfered with the building of the Test and Trace system to maximise his chances of hitting his target.
READ MORE: Dominic Cummings criticises Nicola Sturgeon over Covid briefings
Cummings told the Committee: “It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm.”
In the Commons, Hancock said: “Setting and meeting ambitious targets is how you get stuff done in Government.”
Hancock is set to hold a press conference later today.
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