Thread by @GoodLawProject

Yesterday, Matt Hancock brazenly rationalised his own breaches of transparency law as merely “technical".

This line had not gone down well when Hancock’s barrister tried it out with the High Court...THREAD

inews.co.uk/opinion/matt-h…

What does “technical” mean, asked the Judge?

Nothing, said Philip Moser QC - barrister for the Secretary of State.

In his judgment, the Judge decried the Government's use of “technical” as an:

“attempt to suggest, contrary to the fact, that the breaches were trivial or that they had occurred in an insubstantial number of cases.”

It wouldn’t work for you or us if we tried to say it was 'a technical' breach with a traffic cop. And it didn’t play for Hancock before the High Court either.

We all stand equal - Member of Parliament and member of the public alike - before the law.

Respect for the law is not the only orthodoxy this Government has sacrificed - transparency, too, has fallen by the wayside...

The declaration from the High Court is hugely significant - if Government continues to fail to publish contract details within the legal timeframe it is doing so in full knowledge it is breaching the law, and hindering scrutiny:

The Judge was clear: "the public were entitled to see who this money was going to, what it was being spent on and how the relevant contracts were awarded."

And that scrutiny of where public money was going was prevented: if the publication had been on time we "would have been able to scrutinise CANs and contract provisions, ask questions about them and raise any issues with oversight bodies such as the NAO or via MPs in Parliament".