The second report of the Covid Inquiry has questioned Sir Chris Wormald’s leadership of the Department of Health and Social Care during the pandemic.
The report, from module two of the inquiry, on decision-making and political governance, says Wormald failed to correct the false impression then-health secretary Matt Hancock gave to No.10 and the Cabinet Office about the ability of DHSC to cope with its role in the pandemic response.
Published yesterday afternoon, the report describes how DHSC was under severe pressure in the initial months of 2020 which affected its response. It says No.10 and the Cabinet Office needed to understand the challenges it was facing and consider how these could be addressed, but instead Hancock gave assurances that the department was managing the crisis effectively that “were later discovered to be unjustified”.
The report says Wormald, as the most senior official in DHSC, was responsible for “rectifying the overenthusiastic impression” Hancock had given to No.10 and the Cabinet Office, was aware of Hancock’s assurances and “that there were some concerns that these assurances were misleading”. However, the inquiry said it saw “no evidence” that the then-permanent secretary took such action.
The report says his failure to do so “gave rise to additional concerns at the centre of the UK government about the effectiveness of Sir Christopher Wormald’s leadership” at DHSC.
It adds that Hancock’s unjustified assurances and Wormald’s failure to rectify these assurances “obscured the reality and the need for more action”.
The report paints a damning picture of Hancock’s time as health secretary.
In a section on “addressing challenges”, it says: “Challenges will be encountered during any emergency. It is essential that leaders identify and understand the nature of these obstacles and that they are candid with other decision-makers and advisers about the scale of any such challenges. This approach ensures that any problems that may impede the effectiveness of the response can be addressed at the earliest opportunity. However, during the pandemic, Mr Hancock did not adopt such an approach to challenges encountered by the Department of Health and Social Care.”
The report notes that concerns were raised about Hancock’s truthfulness and reliability in government meetings. On 3 June 2020, Sir Mark Sedwill sent a message to Simon Case stating: “It’s been [quite] a pattern. Matt overpromising, underdelivering.” Sedwill told the inquiry that he had had concerns that Hancock was “overpromising, overconfident”, and that he had had to “double-check what we were being told” to make sure that programmes were in fact on track.
Prof Patrick Vallance, who was the government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, told the inquiry that Hancock “had a habit of saying things which he didn’t have a basis for, and he would say them too enthusiastically too early, without the evidence to back them up, and then have to backtrack from them days later”.
Helen MacNamara, who was deputy cabinet secretary from 2020 to 2021, described Hancock’s “nuclear levels of confidence” as a problem. And Boris Johnson, the prime minister during the pandemic, identified a “chronic optimism bias” at DHSC.
The report says these concerns about Hancock began to emerge in April 2020. MacNamara told the inquiry that, during this time, there were “increasing questions about the performance of DHSC and the health secretary where the issue was a lack of confidence that what he said was happening was actually happening”.
She said there was “a pattern of being reassured that something was absolutely fine and then discovering it was very, very far from fine”.
The inquiry says that thereafter, the Cabinet Office and No.10 “lacked trust and confidence” in Hancock and DHSC.
It says Cummings advised Johnson in April and May 2020 of the issues with Hancock’s reliability and advised Johnson in August 2020 that Hancock should be removed from his post. It says the then-cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill also told Johnson of the concerns which had arisen in relation to Mr Hancock’s candour and his tendency to overpromise, and advised the then-PM that he might wish to remove Hancock from his post as a result.
Johnson told the inquiry that, despite being aware of the concerns about Hancock’s impact on the effectiveness of the Covid-19 response, he thought the health secretary was “doing a good job in difficult circumstances” and did not think moving him “would be worth the disruption it would cause”.
Hancock told the inquiry that “nobody raised any of these issues with me at the time” and denied that he had lied to or misled colleagues about the ability of the department to respond effectively to the pandemic.
However, Wormald told the inquiry that he had, on one occasion, discussed these matters with Hancock, and explained: “I don’t think he was in any doubt that some people thought that [he was overpromising].”
Wormald told the inquiry that, at the time, he had not been aware of how widely these concerns were held: he had thought they were confined to “a very small number of people who were not Mr Hancock’s friends saying this, as opposed to a widespread thing around government”.
“In fact, the concerns were more widespread and justified,” the report says.
Hancock's time as health secretary came to an end in June 2021 after he breached coronavirus rules when he kissed a colleague.
Along with the criticism of Wormald's failure to correct Hancock's false assurances, the report praises Wormald's establishment of regular meetings with the permanent secretaries of the devolved administrations from March 2020 to share views, developments and ideas about Covid-19.
The report says Dame Shan Morgan, who was Welsh Government perm sec from 2017 to 2021, believed that these groups were an example of effective communication among senior officials of the four nations and that the inquiry agrees.
The report includes many references to actions by Simon Case and Mark Sedwill, who were the cabinet secretaries during the pandemic, and comments they made to the inquiry, but did not make any positive or negative comment on their contributions.