Thread by @GoodLawProject

Explosive emails revealed at the High Court today show the shambolic nature of the Government's testing programme... 🧵(1/10)

In new internal emails we can publish today, civil servants described the Government’s “unlegit” and “no way to do business” 🤨 (2/10)

The emails were uncovered in the course of our legal action over the award of multimillion-pound testing contracts to Abingdon Health during the pandemic, which has reached the High Court this week ⚖️ (3/10)

Despite warnings from Government’s own lawyers that these contracts could be unlawful as they bypassed the procurement process, emails reveal Ministers steamrolled the project anyway, with Matt Hancock exhorting his team to “go hell for leather” at it 👇 (4/10)

In Court today, it was revealed that the senior civil servant responsible for the antibody testing team fretted that the preferential treatment being given to Abingdon Health would mean that competitors “might complain”😬 (5/10)

An accounting officer wrote of his wider concerns about “how unlegit the entire testing strand is” (6/10)

Further emails between civil servants reveal they were told by Ministers “don’t bother with HMT and rules, just buy the stuff and we can deal with it later” - and one references “No 10” trying to push through a separate deal that was “dodgy”. (7/10)

💸It’s little wonder that costs on testing quickly spiralled out of control, with the “lack of clarity on value being delivered against big contracts such as Randox” (8/10)

Documents revealed over the life of this case have shown, despite Ministers’ denials, that a fast-track ‘VIP route’ was created for preferred testing suppliers, just like with dodgy PPE procurement... (9/10)

The High Court hearing continues until Thursday.

Further details here ⬇️ (10/10)
glplive.org/abingdon-tw-03…

This information only came to light due to our legal case.

If you'd like to help us do more work like this, consider setting up a regular donation here ⚖️👇
glplive.org/eme