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Jo Maugham QC Profile picture
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13 Nov, 4 tweets, 2 min read
So the Government spent £75m on tests on the basis of a 'preprint' study which was not peer reviewed, was funded by some of the consortium developing and producing the test, and which wrongly suggested that the test gave no false positive results. bmj.com/content/371/bm…
"If the test is used in the community as intended, and assuming that 10% of recipients have previously been infected, around one in five positive AbC-19 tests would be a false positive, the findings suggest."
We also know from this report from @sarahboseley
yesterday that the Government tried to supress publication of the study that exposed the flaws in the non-peer-reviewed "pre-print". theguardian.com/world/2020/nov…
We at @GoodLawProject are not huge fans of procurement exercises that ignore the evidence, and we're certainly not fans of Government suppressing inconvenient but politically embarrassing evidence, which is why we have begun legal proceedings. crowdjustice.com/case/abingdon-…

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More from @JolyonMaugham

Jo Maugham QC Profile picture
15 Nov
Some righteous fury from @KamranAbbasi on the "state corruption on a grand scale" of this Government's response to the pandemic. bmj.com/content/371/bm…
So many of the outrages Kamran identifies we at @GoodLawProject are challenging by judicial review.

The disgraceful £100bn Moonshot project, embarked on without the consent of Parliament or consulting its own expert body, the NSC (crowdjustice.com/case/operation…). Image
The Government's disgraceful attempt to suppress research proving it was wrong to spend £75m on the basis of biased research (crowdjustice.com/case/abingdon-…). Image
Read 9 tweets
Jo Maugham QC Profile picture
14 Nov
So if we carried on using PPE at the same rate as at the height of the first wave we would use about 6.8bn items in a year. gov.uk/government/pub…
Which makes it rather odd that Government itself says we have purchased 36.7bn items - well over *five years* supply assuming we continue to use it at the highest rates we ever have. Image
Indeed we bought so much that we don't have warehouse space for it and eleven thousand containers of it are clogging up Felixstowe. theguardian.com/business/2020/…
Read 7 tweets
Jo Maugham QC Profile picture
14 Nov
An FOI request of the Health and Safety Executive in relation to PPE supplied to the Department of Health by Pestfix has turned up some quite extraordinary material. THREAD
The first is that, although the DHSC has refused in the litigation to release price data for the £32m coverall contract (or at all), the HSE has released that price data further to the FOI request. It shows we paid Crisp Websites £14.02 per coverall (plus shipping). Image
A comparison price today from Unicef (supply.unicef.org/s0305117.html) for type 6B coveralls is $8.12 (i.e. less than half what we paid Crisp Websites).
Read 25 tweets
Jo Maugham QC Profile picture
12 Nov
Absolutely staggering. After @GoodLawProject sued DHSC for unlawfully procuring PPE from Pestfix, DHSC put pressure on the Health and Safety Executive to lie and say that Pestfix PPE had passed safety checks. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-548977…
Government entered into 11 contracts with tiny pest control specialist Pestfix. Government has (unlawfully) failed to publish five. The six we can see sum to about a third of a billion pounds. At least one was bought on the basis of fake documents. Image
We will, of course, be drawing this email correspondence to the attention of the High Court urgently. And we need to see the entirety of it but there is at the very least a suspicion that DHSC has sought to conjure up false evidence to put before the High Court.
Read 6 tweets
Jo Maugham QC Profile picture
12 Nov
In which a £75million contract was awarded without competition on the basis of profoundly flawed research. And when confronted with evidence of those flaws Government tried to suppress publication of that evidence. crowdjustice.com/case/abingdon-…
You can read more about the Abingdon Health debacle here. (And there is more to come tomorrow.) theguardian.com/world/2020/nov…
It's worth reading this piece from back in August by the redoubtable @deeksj about flaws in the Abingdon tests. This Govt has a rather worrying habit of presenting misleading data to support the businesses it gives hugely valuable public contracts to. 🤔 theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Read 5 tweets
Jo Maugham QC Profile picture
11 Nov
Nice to have the leader of the Labour Party behind us.
Revealing to hear Johnson go out of his way to praise the private sector (especially in the context of Ayanda doing taxpayers over). A wee bird in Treasury told us yesterday of their belief that this outsourcing is part of a systemic attempt to dismantle the civil service.
If you'd like to read the extraordinary story of Ayanda, as told by the Government's own lawyers, you can do so here. rebrand.ly/gld-ris-2907
Read 6 tweets

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