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Covid inquiry: Ex-NHS chief refuses to say whether Matt Hancock lied [1]
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Date: 2023-11
The former chief executive of the NHS repeatedly refused to say whether Matt Hancock lied during the pandemic while health secretary.
Simon Stevens was in charge of NHS England between 2014 and 2021 and a key figure in the government’s response to coronavirus. Under questioning at the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry this morning he declined to say whether he considered Hancock to be “truthful” and admitted to occasional “tensions”. It comes after the inquiry was told by Dominic Cummings and Helen MacNamara this week that Hancock repeatedly failed to tell the truth about pandemic plans.
“There were occasional moments of tension and flashpoints, which is probably inevitable during the course of a 15-month-plus pandemic,” Stevens told Andrew O’Connor, counsel to the inquiry, when asked whether Hancock was “someone who was untruthful”.
“But I was brought up always to look to the best in people.”
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He added: “I know various people have made quite strong accusations against Matt Hancock.
“What I would say is strong accusations need strong evidence to back them up and I don't think I've seen that evidence.”
Pressed again by O’Connor, Stevens would only say the disgraced former health secretary was someone he found to be truthful “for the most part”.
He said: “I'm not denying that there were a small handful of occasions during the course of the year, year and a half, when there were tensions.
“But that I don't think is deeply surprising given the circumstances under which everybody was working.”
Stevens’ written evidence to the inquiry also included a reference to the Operation Nimbus planning exercise held in February 2020, which considered what steps might be taken if rising numbers of Covid patients started to overwhelm the NHS’s capacity to care for everyone else.
Hancock reportedly believed it was he himself who should “ultimately decide who should live or die”, but, Stevens wrote, “fortunately this horrible dilemma never crystalised”.
In the hearing, Stevens was also shown messages between Cummings and Hancock from January and February 2020 about removing Stevens from his role. In one exchange, Cummings said Stevens and Hancock were “bullshitting again”.
“By the standard of Dominic Cummings, that is one of his gentler epithets,” Stevens told the inquiry.
Later in the day, Christopher Wormald, who was permanent secretary of the Department of Health and Social Care under Hancock, put the accusations against his former boss down to his attempts to be “aspirational”.
Following repeated questions from inquiry lead counsel Hugo Keith over whether he was aware of Hancock misleading people, Wormald said: “There were a lot of people who said that the secretary of state [Hancock] was overly optimistic about what would happen and overpromised what could be delivered.
“That was said quite a lot.
“I think it was actually a very small number of people who said that he was actually telling untruths.”
The inquiry is now 17 days into its second module, focusing on the government’s response in the early stages of the pandemic.
Yesterday, MacNamara said a “pattern” had been noted of Hancock offering reassurance that “something was absolutely fine and then discovering it was very, very far from fine".
She also said “time and time again” Hancock – without “any ambiguity” – told fellow Cabinet ministers that plans were in place during the pandemic, which was not the case.
Asked whether Hancock was saying things that weren’t true, she added: “It's definitely the view in government. I think it's fair to say it's what we experienced.”
Evidence submitted by MacNamara, who was called a “c**t” in messages sent by Cummings, former adviser to then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, included an account of encountering Hancock, who pretended to be a cricketer and said: “They bowl them at me, I knock them away.”
Hancock’s conduct during the pandemic has also been raised previously in the inquiry.
The inquiry continues. openDemocracy is fundraising to pay reporters to cover every day of the public hearings. Please support us by donating here.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-inquiry-nhs-simon-stevens-matt-hancock/
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