HM’s Government acted unlawfully when it handed a £560,000 contract to a firm run by former colleagues of Michael Gove and the PM’s adviser Dominic Cummings, the High Court has ruled.
Mr Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, denied any favouritism had been shown to market research agency Public First.
However, the ruling judge said a failure to consider other firms could be seen as suggesting a “real danger” of bias.
Public First looked into public understanding of coronavirus, campaigners took legal action against Mr Gove over the Cabinet Office’s decision to use the company following the start of the pandemic last year.
They also quizzed the involvement of Mr Cummings who was a senior advisor to the Prime Minister until he quit last autumn.
Lawyers for the Good Law Project said that Mr Cummings wanted focus group and communications support services work to be given to Public First, the founding partners of this venture was Rachel Wolf and James Frayne.
In 2011, Mr Frayne became director of communications at the Department of Education, where he worked alongside Mr Cummings, who was a special adviser to Mr Gove, the then education secretary.
Ms Wolf formerly worked as an adviser to Mr Gove and for Mr Cummings and also co-wrote the Conservatives’ 2019 general election manifesto.
The government and Mr Cummings disputed the Good Law Project’s claim.
Delivering her ruling, Mrs Justice O’Farrell said: “The claimant is entitled to a declaration that the decision of 5 June 2020 to award the contract to Public First gave rise to apparent bias and was unlawful.”
She said: “The defendant’s failure to consider any other research agency, by reference to experience, expertise, availability or capacity, would lead a fair-minded and informed observer to conclude that there was a real possibility, or a real danger, that the decision-maker was biased.”
But she also said: “The fair-minded and informed observer would have appreciated that there was an urgent need or research through focus groups on effective communications in response to the Covid-19 crisis and that those research services were required immediately.”
n his witness statement, Mr Cummings told the court: “The country was facing an unprecedented national emergency. Thousands of lives were at stake, hundreds of billions of pounds were at stake.
“The extra money spent on doubling the focus groups and polling was essentially irrelevant in those circumstances.
“A few people did raise the question of how we could justify this as value for money. I responded that this was not the normal world, we were in a once-a-century pandemic and many thousands of pounds here was trivial if it helped us save lives and minimise economic destruction.”
Following the High Court ruling, he tweeted: “When it became clear [the Department of Health, Public Health England and the Cabinet Office] weren’t gathering vital data, I acted urgently. This data immediately helped key decisions and saved lives.”
Editor-in-Chief | Carl D. Pearson has been involved in British politics and media from an early age, with the key knowledge of what it takes to run a news organisation for the 21st century. Mr Pearson, as Editor-in-chief, is responsible for supervising the daily tasks of publishing media and content to UNN’s website and various platforms.
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