The Government suppressed an official report that proved there were issues with rapid antibody tests purchased by the Department of Health. Leaked emails reveal the Government blocked Public Health England from publishing their findings until after they could make an announcement that they had purchased one million antibody tests from Abingdon Health. 

The Government supported the creation of the UK Rapid Test Consortium (UK-RTC) back in April. The idea was that the companies and institutions involved, including Abingdon Health, would create a rapid antibody test. On 2nd June, Government awarded a contract worth £10million to Abingdon Health for the materials needed to produce the test. On 14th August, they handed Abingdon Health another contract worth a staggering £75million. 

Despite these huge sums of money, Government seems to have ignored widely held concerns that tests were not fit for purpose. So a £75million contract was awarded without competition, on the basis of profoundly flawed research. And when confronted with evidence of these flaws Government tried to suppress publication of that evidence.

These are serious charges and we have set out the publicly available evidence in this chronology, which we will update as more evidence is published.

To protect public money and to seek to encourage Government towards honesty, we have issued judicial review proceedings in respect of the Abingdon Health contract awards. Our case rests on the following grounds:

• Government’s apparent failure to conduct any lawful or sufficient inquiry or evaluation of the accuracy of the rapid antibody tests.
• The award of these contracts seemingly without any advertisement or competition between bidders

Good Law Project has instructed Joseph Barrett of 11KBW Chambers and Rook Irwin Sweeney.  They will work considerably below market rates. 

The legal challenge is being crowdfunded. If you’re in a position to do so, you can make a donation here.

https://rebrand.ly/uc-judgment

The High Court has now ruled Michael Gove broke the law by giving a contract to a communications agency run by long time associates of him and Dominic Cummings.

The Court found that the decision to award the £560,000 contract to Public First was tainted by “apparent bias” and was unlawful.

You can read the judgment here.

Why do so many public contracts end up with friends of Dominic Cummings? Like us, you might have wondered. But, although reporters pick these stories up, nothing ever happens. Well, this time it’s different.

On 3 March 2020, the Cabinet Office shook hands with Public First, a small privately held polling company. There was no formal contract, prior advertisement, or competitive tender process. It just made what procurement lawyers call a ‘direct award’. It formalised it retrospectively on 5 June 2020 and publicised it a week later. The total contract value is £840,000.

The directors and owners of Public First are Ms Rachel Wolf and Mr James Frayne. They have close connections with both the Minister for the Cabinet Office (the Rt Hon Michael Gove MP) and his long time colleague and Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister who works in the Cabinet Office (Mr Dominic Cummings).

We believe that money for your mates, on a handshake, formalised later, is unlawful. 

This is why Good Law Project has instructed Rook Irwin Sweeney and leading procurement lawyers Jason Coppel QC and Patrick Halliday. You can read our formal pre action protocol letter to Mr Gove and Mr Cummings here , the proceedings here , and the fully particularised claim form here. 

To ensure value for money, to protect public funds, to guard against cronyism and bungs, one must put public contracts out to tender. And there was no exception here to that rule.

Victory