Government wins appeal over contract given to Dom Cummings’ friends
The government has won its appeal to overturn a court judgement that a contract handed to a company run by Dominic Cummings’ friends was unlawful.
The High Court ruled last year that a £550,000 government contract given to Public First, a firm founded by friends of the former Number 10 aide, was unlawful due to “apparent bias”
The firm was given the contract to run focus groups to research the public reaction to the government’s Covid slogans, including the “stay at home, save lives, protect the NHS” tagline.
The case was brought against the government by the Good Law Project, with High Court judge Dame Finola O’Farrell initially ruling there had been “apparent bias” due to the Cabinet Office not considering other applications for the contract.
The Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett, in the appeal ruling, said the original decision was an “unprecedented outcome” and that a fair-minded and informed observer would say there “was nothing unlawful in the involvement of Mr Cummings in the decision-making process”.
He said there was no “apparent bias” because of the time-sensitive nature of the contract and because Public First was just one of two UK firms that had the “scale, expertise and experience” to immediately fulfil the contract.
“Quite apart from Mr Cummings, experienced civil servants… knew what services were urgently needed in a public health emergency and were intimately familiar with the market for their provision,” Burnett said.
Cummings said the ruling was “total vindication for my decisions on moving super speedy on procurement to save lives”.
James Eadie QC, representing the Cabinet Office, had argued that it was wrong to say the government needed to explore other bids for the contract.
“An informed observer would understand that there is an emergency or urgency process built into the system which obviates the need to do the comparative exercise between different potential bidders,” he said.