Dominic Cummings defends £500k pandemic contract awarded to firm run by his friends

Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings has defended a £500,000 Government contract awarded to the PR consultancy Public First, insisting its founders were not hired because they are his friends.

Mr Cummings submitted a witness statement as part of judicial review proceedings into the contract, which was awarded to the consultancy firm last year.

The company ran focus groups for Downing Street in a bid to improve the Government’s messaging on the coronavirus crisis, and road tested the slogan: “Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives.”

Public First is run by James Frayne, who worked with Dominic Cummings in the Department for Education in 2011, and his wife Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Tory manifesto.

The Good Law Project, a campaign group, took legal action over the contract, accusing the Government of “apparent bias”.

Jason Coppel QC told the judge at a virtual High Court hearing that "no other provider was considered".

He said more than £500,000 had been spent and told the judge that it was "not strictly necessary" to award the contract to Public First without competition.

In his statement, Mr Cummings said Britain had been facing an emergency because of the coronavirus crisis and "the award of the contract without delay" was "entirely justified".

Watch: High Court judge ponders awarding of contract to friends of Dominic Cummings

The former Downing Street adviser said he was friends with people involved in the company but added: "Obviously I did not request Public First be brought in because they were my friends".

"I would never do such a thing."

"Urgent help was needed to communicate effectively essential health messages to the public," he said.

"I requested that Public First be brought in to mirror the focus groups already being done just as I also requested that the Government start doing other polling in parallel to what it was already doing.

"I was the driving decision-maker on this."

A spokesman for the company said Mr Frayne had not spoken to Mr Cummings since 2016 and Ms Wolf had not spoken to him since the beginning of the pandemic, except when Mr Cummings asked if a member of her staff could be seconded to Downing Street.

Mr Cummings, who left Downing Street in November, said his role as a special adviser did not permit him to direct civil servants, but that he "expected people to hire Public First" after he had suggested it.

He said the nature of his role was that people took what he said as "an instruction” because people assumed he was "often speaking for the Prime Minister".

He added: "A few people did raise the question of how we could justify this as value for money.

"I responded that this was not the normal world, we were in a once-a-century pandemic and many thousands of pounds here was trivial if it helped us save lives and minimise economic destruction.”

Natascha Engel, a former Labour MP who worked on Public First's research, said: "As the court heard, the Government turned to Public First in an unprecedented emergency because we have a rare combination of opinion research expertise, deep policy knowledge and we understand how Government and the Civil Service works.

“At times like this, Governments choose who they think are going to do the best job. Our work had a huge positive impact on how the Government spoke to the public.

"Given James Frayne hasn't spoken to Dominic Cummings in several years and neither he nor Rachel Wolf spoke to Dominic Cummings or Michael Gove about Covid research, the idea this was some sort of quiet arrangement between friends is clearly wrong."

The judicial review hearing continues.

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