Health News at Your Fingertips

Back at the Covid inquiry, Hugo Keith KC is now asking Rishi Sunak about claims that the Treasury was seen as the “pro-death” squad.

Sunak says he was not aware of that. And he says that is not a “fair characterisation”. He says Treasury officials worked very hard, and they developed schemes that got the UK through Covid.

Keith said officials in No 10 described the Treasury as the “pro-death squad”, but he did not mention the fact that Boris Johnson himself used the term. At an earlier hearing the inquiry was read an extract from Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary which said:

The PM is on record as saying that he wants tier 3, 1 March; tier 2, 1 April; tier 1, 1 May; and nothing by September, and he ends up by saying the team must bring in ‘the pro-death squad from HMT’.

Mark Francois, the chair of the European Research Group, has suggested the government should pull its Rwanda bill and produce a new version before the second reading vote. (See 2.11pm.) He told GB News:

This bill means that individuals can keep tying the government up in legal knots. That’s why it needs to be redrafted.

The bill, because of the shape of it, because of its style, its legal structure would be quite difficult to amend.

I very much hope that, rather than plough on and damn the torpedoes, the government will listen, exercise common sense, pull the legislation and come back with something that is fit for purpose.

We’ve had two previous legislative attempts at this. The nationalities and borders bill that didn’t quite work, the illegal immigration bill that didn’t quite work.

This really is the last chance so the government would be well advised to get it right.

Keith asks Sunak about a line in the Spectator interview where Sunak said, referring to Sage: “If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed.”

Sunak says he was referring to the need for policy decisions to be taken by politicians. And he suggests there may be a case for an economic counterpoint to Sage.

Keith returns to the Spectator interview with Sunak published in the summer of 2022. He asks about a line in the article saying Covid policy “being decided by half-explained graphs cooked up by outside academics”.

Sunak says those are not his words.

Lady Hallett, the chair, tells Keith that justifying the phrase is a question for the author, the Spectator editor Fraser Nelson.

Sunak says he does want to make a point about Sage, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. He says Sage’s views were presented as a consensus view.

But people did not realise how much divergence there was on Sage, he says.

Keith tells the inquiry that, while there is some evidence to suggest a link between use of the “eat out to help out” scheme and a rise in Covid cases, there is also other evidence showing that there was no correlation.

But he asks why the scheme was not extended.

Sunak says it was always intended to be temporary.

At the Covid inquiry Rishi Sunak insists that the government’s main scientific adviser, Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, had the opportunity to raise concerns about the “eat out to help out” scheme with him.

Sunak lists several meetings they attended, where they could have raised the topic but didn’t.

Hugo Keith KC said in their evidence Whitty and Vallance said they were not specifically consulted about this. If they had been, they would have advised against, he says.

The government has just published a summary of its legal assessment of the Rwanda bill.

And here is the summary at the end of the document.

As set out above, the treaty, bill and evidence together demonstrate Rwanda is safe for relocated individuals, that the government’s approach is tough but fair and lawful, that it has a justification in the UK’s constitution and domestic law, and it seeks to uphold our international obligations. This is a novel and contentious policy, and the UK and Rwanda are the first countries in the world to enact it together. There are risks inherent in such an innovative approach but there is a clear lawful basis on which a responsible government may proceed. For the reasons set out in this paper, a bill that sought to oust all individual claims would not provide such a basis.

This is not the same as the government’s internal legal advice, which is always kept private.

At the Covid inquiry Hugo Keith KC is now asking directly about the “eat out to help out” scheme.

Rishi Sunak says the scheme was designed to come into force when safe lifting of other measures had been approved.

He says, without the scheme, many jobs would have been at risk “with devastating consequences”.

The consensus at Westminster has been that Conservative MPs will vote through the Rwanda bill tomorrow. The government has a working majority of 56, which means (roughly) that for the government to lose tomorrow night, 57 of them would have to abstain, or 29 of them would have to vote against. No Tory MP has yet said publicly they intend to vote against, and if the rightwingers or centrists want to amend the bill, they have to give it a second reading first.

But, according to Sky’s Beth Rigby, some ERG figures are now suggesting they would like to see the bill replaced altogether. They are not telling Sky they will vote down the bill, and to maximise their leverage it makes sense for them to keep No 10 guessing, but these comments do imply the bill might be in more jeopardy than previously assumed.

Francois tells me the consensus in the room was to pull the bill and revise it & come back to it.

Mark Francois is ERG chair.

And David Jones, ERG deputy chair, said he doesn’t think the bill amendable in its current form, as he explains why they want bill pulled. So position hardening.

At the briefing by the European Research Group earlier, Mark Francois, the ERG chair, was asked how his group would vote on the Rwanda bill. He replied:

You don’t always announce what you’re going to do well before the bell was ringing.

The briefing was also attended by Danny Kruger, co-chair of the New Conservatives, another group for rightwing Tory MPs. He said:

We’ll be discussing later with colleagues in light of the report that we’ve just received and having further conversations with government over the course of the next 24 hours.

Other groups invited were the Common Sense Group, the Conservative Growth Group and the Northern Research Group.

(In an act of mafia-chic hubris, some media reports have dubbed this lot the “five families”. But that may be more of a media invention than a term any of these Tories are using themselves. The memberships of the groups overlap a lot and it may be more helpful to think of them as just different iterations of the Tory right.)

Rishi Sunak will want to know what the European Research Group is saying about his Rwanda bill. Here are the main conclusions from the 10-page document legal assessment of the bill produced by the ERG’s “star chamber”, led by Sir Bill Cash. (Bold text added by me.)

The bill overall provides a partial and incomplete solution to the problem of legal challenges in the UK courts being used as stratagems to delay or defeat the removal of illegal migrants to Rwanda, for the following reasons.

Most importantly, the bill contains no restrictions on the bringing of legal challenges against removal to Rwanda based on grounds other than that Rwanda is not a safe country. Many such individual claims have already been brought on a variety of other grounds, and it is to be expected that if the bill successfully blocks challenges based on contentions that Rwanda is not safe, then migrants and their advisers will focus more of their efforts on generating and pursuing challenges of other kinds.

The restriction in the bill is only against pursuing claims that Rwanda is unsafe for migrants removed there in general. Clause 4(1) expressly preserves the possibility of legal challenges to removal based on arguments that a person’s individual circumstances may lead to them being subject to a risk of refoulement and ill treatment. The treaty is intended to address such concerns. However, by allowing individual claims, appeals, and injunctions, the statutory scheme is open to significant levels of legal challenge. Experience to date in cases about attempted removal of illegal migrants to Rwanda demonstrates that individual challenges are likely to be numerous, and that they have had a high rate of success.

The bill’s threshold requirement for interim relief that there should be a risk of “serious and irreparable harm” is in practice much easier to surmount than the words might suggest, for example through the provision of medical statements of mental conditions which are not easy to prove or disprove (for example, suicidal ideation). There is a serious risk that there will be no, or very few, actual removals to Rwanda for months after the bill comes into force.

Clause 5 of the bill deals with interim measures of the Strasbourg court (so-called “rule 39 indications”) by stating that a minister of the crown may decide not to comply with them. In our view this does no more than restate the existing legal position, since (1) there are compelling arguments that rule 39 indications do not give rise to an obligation in international law to comply with them, and (2) in any event Strasbourg court rulings do not of themselves create obligations which are enforceable under domestic UK law. Perversely, the inclusion of ministerial decisions relating to rule 39 indications in clause 5(2) of the bill might give rise to a possibility of bringing judicial reviews against such decisions which would not otherwise arise. It would be preferable if the bill were positively to require such interim indications [ECtHR injunctions] to be disregarded when UK courts refuse interim relief.

The Covid inquiry has stopped for lunch. Rishi Sunak is off somewhere – no doubt to get briefed on the latest prouncement from the ERG.

Back at the Commons, the ERG is meeting again tonight, ITV’s Carl Dinnen reports.

The ERG and others won’t yet commit to how they plan to vote.

They will meet again at 6pm to hear from Robert Jenrick.