3. Mr Dominic Raab

MR DOMINIC RAAB (sworn).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Lady Hallett: I hope we haven’t kept you waiting too long, Mr Raab.

The Witness: Fine, thank you.

Mr O’Connor: Could you give the Inquiry your full name, please.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes, Mr O’Connor, it’s Dominic Rennie Raab.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Raab, you have kindly prepared for the Inquiry a witness statement, which is on the screen now. We can see it bears your name, it’s dated both in the top right-hand corner of the first page and at the last page, we don’t need to go to it, 8 September, and on the last page there is your signature, beneath a statement indicating that you believe the contents of the statement to be true. Is that right?

Mr Dominic Raab: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Raab, you were elected the MP for Esher and Walton in the 2010 general election, I think it’s right to say?

Mr Dominic Raab: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And you have of course been an MP ever since. You held a series of junior ministerial roles between 2015 and 2018; is that right?

Mr Dominic Raab: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: It was in July 2018 that you were appointed as the Secretary of State for exiting the European Union, a post you held until November of that year?

Mr Dominic Raab: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Then in July 2019 you were appointed as both First Secretary of State and also Foreign Secretary, and those two posts you held for a two-year period until September 2021; is that right?

Mr Dominic Raab: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And perhaps it goes without saying that that is the period with which we will be most concerned in the questions you have to answer this afternoon.

But just for completeness, first of all, we should bear in mind that midway through that period the Foreign Office was merged with the Department for International Development, so you took on that extra aspect of its responsibilities whilst Foreign Secretary.

Then, secondly, you were in September 2021 appointed as Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor and also Deputy Prime Minister, and those posts you held for about a year, until September 2022, and then again, under the current Prime Minister, between October 2022 and April this year?

Mr Dominic Raab: All of that is correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

As I say, of course the questions we have for you this afternoon will focus on the period of the pandemic, and in very broad summary, would it be right to say that for a period of about a month in April 2020, because, as we’ll come to hear, of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s illness, you had a very particular role, you stepped up and essentially took his place for a period of about four weeks at that time?

Then both before that, from January to April 2020, and in the period afterwards, you had a rather different role, principally as Foreign Secretary, but also supporting the Prime Minister as First Secretary?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes, and I mean, I should say, I still tried to do the Foreign Secretary role at the time I was covering for the PM when he was ill – disposed, shall I put it like that, so the Foreign Secretary role didn’t drop away.

Counsel Inquiry: No. Well, perhaps the role of Foreign Secretary is one that’s reasonably familiar, and of course we’ll come to some of the detail in a moment, but I’d like to ask you just a little bit more about the role of First Secretary, which is perhaps less well known.

To do that can we look, please, at paragraphs 19 and 20 of your witness statement on page 6.

You make the point there, Mr Raab, first of all, and perhaps this is worth bearing in mind, that the role of First Secretary is not one that is always filled, and indeed, as you note, it hadn’t been occupied prior to your appointment, as I’ve mentioned, in July 2019.

Is that right?

Mr Dominic Raab: Correct, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Just help us, you go on to talk about the role of Deputy Prime Minister a couple of paragraphs further down. I think you would say that both roles are somewhat hazy and depend rather on who is filling them and what the wishes of those who have appointed them to that post are. But are they, in one sense, fairly similar and another way, asking the same question, would there normally be a First Secretary and a Deputy Prime Minister or not?

Mr Dominic Raab: I don’t think I’ve ever known of a situation where you would have a First Secretary and a Deputy Prime Minister. The Deputy Prime Minister role is more formalised, but as you said it all depends on the wishes of the Prime Minister and frankly the structure that he and the occupant of the role wishes to put around it, whether it’s – and normally the lead will come from the Prime Minister.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Dominic Raab: The most obvious recent example, other than myself doing it or the subsequent holders of the office, is when we were in coalition and Mr Clegg was Deputy Prime Minister. I mean, I know others have done it before. But there, in the context of a coalition agreement, you can see how the structure would be formalised. But there aren’t – there’s not a sort of detailed manual.

Counsel Inquiry: No. And certainly I think it’s apparent from paragraph 20 of your witness statement that that rather formal and well understood role that Nick Clegg held was rather different from your role as First Minister – sorry, First Secretary during this earlier period. As you say here, you understood the role to be, your words, “a sort of gap filling ‘fixer’”, being asked to do certain roles that perhaps fell outside the portfolios of other Cabinet ministers, supporting the Prime Minister when you could, and of course, as we’ll come to, stepping in for him when necessary.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes. I mean, there are different ways of doing it, and I think that’s basically right.

The reality is the demands on any modern Prime Minister are several times what he or she could realistically do, and therefore a need to prioritise to the extent that a First Secretary or a DPM can lighten the load I think it’s a smart thing to do. And what I would try to find is the serious, earnest, but perhaps not either as politically imperative stuff for the PM to be spending his precious minutes on, and just try to shift a little bit of that off the plate, and I’ve done that for two Prime Ministers.

Counsel Inquiry: Just before we leave this, in imagining your role during this period, 2020 and into 2021, it would be wrong, wouldn’t it, for us to imagine that you were fulfilling a role that meant you being by the Prime Minister’s side all the time?

Mr Dominic Raab: Oh, in fact I would say it was quite important to – in discharging that role, to – precisely to allow the Prime Minister to go and do other things. So sitting there – I mean, that’s what a chief of staff is for, you know, a member of his private office to man mark the Prime Minister, whoever that would be. That’s not the role of the First Secretary.

Counsel Inquiry: And just to put some focus on that, this Inquiry has heard a lot of evidence about the regular – the daily meetings that the Prime Minister undertook, 9.15 meeting, the Quads, the informal meetings with the Chief Medical Officer and so on. We will see that you attended those meetings occasionally, but certainly it was no part of your role as First Secretary to be a regular attender of those meetings.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah, I mean, my experience of government meetings is you can have over-attendance, if I can put it like that, but you need the right balance between diversity of views, in its broadest sense, and then be able to cut to the chase and make decisions. You don’t need everyone there otherwise it becomes, if you like, a climbing frame with everyone trying to crawl over it without actually being able to chart a way forward. I think that’s actually a mistake.

So, for sure, I wouldn’t have actually to be there in the room with the PM all the time, holding his hand. He didn’t need that. Neither Prime Minister I’ve worked for have, neither have any of the predecessors.

Counsel Inquiry: I’d like to ask you just a couple of points about more general governance issues before we turn to the detail of the chronology. The first relates to the role of the Cabinet in decision-making during this period, 2020/2021.

The Inquiry has heard evidence from a variety of witnesses, I think initially from Helen MacNamara, but then from others, including Mr Javid today, about, if you like, the marginalisation of Cabinet during this period, the idea being of whereas Cabinet may have previously been an area where policy was debated and formed, if you like, a practice developed, no doubt not uniform but nonetheless it became more frequent, for policies to be decided in smaller groups and then presented to Cabinet for decision-making or even perhaps one might describe it as rubber stamping.

Counsel Inquiry: Is that a description that you’re familiar with from this period?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes, I probably wouldn’t agree with framing it in quite those terms. I think Cabinet can be used for a scalable range of business, from an open discussion to tease out views, to decision-making with some rapidity, and all the points along the spectrum in between. That’s been the case for every Prime Minister I’ve served, including David Cameron.

So, for example, just in the context of Brexit, of course Cabinet was incredibly important but you had a – then, as you did under Covid, you had the Covid – the Brexit – the XS, as it was called and XO, like we had Covid-S and Covid-O, and you also had other COBR meetings. You would expect to distill decisions down with the right cast, then to put it to Cabinet, but Cabinet doesn’t need to duplicate discussions that have been held at length. And where the decision has been considered at length, I mean, I think that would be, frankly, poor use of ministers’ and government’s time. But it depends what the issue is.

I think what is important is that Cabinet can and anyone in Cabinet who hasn’t been privy to some of those earlier discussions, either because, in honest terms, they are peripheral to them in terms of their brief or because something may have been missed, in good faith, I think it’s always the opportunity to raise a hand and question and test, and that happened right the way through the period.

But Cabinet was a tier on top of all of these other tiers of government put in place to deal with the emergency.

Counsel Inquiry: Just picking up on that last point, Mr Raab, one of the suggestions that’s been made is that as a consequence of Cabinet decision-making being drawn back, something of a variety of input and understanding, a broad understanding of real life may have been lost. Do you agree with that or not?

Mr Dominic Raab: No, I don’t think I do, not in those terms. I mean, whether any Cabinet, whatever the composition, is going to be a perfect ecumenical reflection of society, I just – I’m not sure that’s what actually it’s there for, but certainly the combination of Cabinet, wider government and Parliament should mean that we’re as sensitive as we possibly can be to all of the strains of information, the views, the sensitivities that are going on.

Look, you – I think Tony Blair said you pay your money and you takes your choice, you can have endless conversation, in which case you’ll never make decisions, or you can try to strike the right balance between getting a proper diversity of views, I mean in the sense of variety of views and test and challenge them, but then be very clear when you need to move forward, which of course, in an emergency like Covid, you do, and make decisions.

The conversation and the discussion cannot go on endlessly, as fascinating and useful as it might be at an academic level. In the same way – and I think I found it informative and learned a lot from the two major scientific officers, so Patrick Vallance and Professor Whitty, about how SAGE operated.

I mean, you could debate, as scientists, just as I’m sure lawyers – and I say this as a recovering lawyer – could debate the themes, the evidence endlessly, at some point you’ve got to decide and take an actionable way forward, and that’s where Cabinet comes in. And to be honest with you, wherever along the spectrum you are with that, someone will criticise you either for not canvassing a broad enough opinion or for not being decisive enough. And as I think Tony Blair said, you pays your money you takes your choice.

I actually found – I’ll let you ask the questions but overall, within the limits of what you could do in an emergency of this nature, as unprecedented as it was, with Cabinet such as it is and the Whitehall infrastructure such as it is, I think we about struck the right balance between testing and canvassing views but making sure we took action.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Let me ask you about a different matter, and that is the role, the influence of Dominic Cummings in Downing Street during 2020.

Again, the Inquiry has heard a lot of evidence about what he did, we’ve heard from him himself, of course. Various people have described his influence, his decisions. What was your impression of him and what’s your understanding of the role he played in decision-making in the early months of the pandemic?

Mr Dominic Raab: You may need to break this – unpack this into slightly more closed questions, otherwise I’ll end up rambling on, but let me give you my headline view.

First of all, I think the big challenge in Number 10 is having a chief of staff who does the organisational structural role, which is – if you think how precious every minute of a Prime Minister’s time, and we all accept that it is finite – how you organise that time authoritatively. Because everyone – you know, you could – there’s ten times as many people want to see the Prime Minister or want that part of his or her time than is physically possible.

That’s a really important role. I think under Boris Johnson, you know, Eddie Lister wasn’t in there as a chief of staff but as a sort of éminence grise, a wise pair of hands. I thought he had the right skillset for that. In terms of Dominic Cummings, that’s not why he was there, whatever the title. His – he was there, was to drive forward delivery and also I think – and he was certainly well disposed to this and I think well suited to this – try and, amidst the daily hustle and bustle of events brought up by the media or whatever was the issue of the day, take a half step back and try and work strategically, and I think that was the intention of his role. And I also thought – you’ll come on to this, you’ll need to ask – but in terms of diagnosis, I mean, quite a few of the things that he diagnosed that were wrong I think he was right about, and actually the pandemic was a proving ground for some of those things: like data in Whitehall, for example, like accountability in relation to the brilliant civil servants that we have. I won’t delve in too much to that until you lead me there, but equally – you know, I was six years a civil servant as a Foreign Office lawyer and have very fond memories, not only of my time as a civil servant but also the professionalism there, so you’re not talking to someone who is down on the civil service by design. And what you’re looking for, in my view, and I think SPADs, including the most senior ones like Dominic Cummings, were looking to try and form this synergy between the role the civil servants play, the candour advice, sense checking and fundamentally executing policy and ministerial accountability to the public for those decisions. I don’t think any government gets this perfectly, but what you’re looking for is that synthesis. SPADs and Dom Cummings in particular are there for that, and I think that is critical.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Raab, that’s an answer about what they might have been there for in principle. Can you help us with your experience of Mr Cummings in practice. Let me read you one sentence of Mr Javid’s witness statement. He said this:

“I felt that the elected Prime Minister was not in charge of what was happening in his name and was largely content with Mr Cummings running the government.”

Do you agree with that?

Mr Dominic Raab: No, I don’t, but let me just say at the outset, and I don’t say this as any disparagement on this committee or this Inquiry, but there is a whole circus that can be built up in the media and elsewhere around the internal battles between individuals, and some of that is natural and healthy, you know, you have tensions between civil servants, between civil servants and SPADs, between all of those and ministers, and of course between ministers. But – I, by the way, worked very closely with Sajid Javid, in fact I worked for him when I was Housing Minister, I like him, I respect him, I think he is a great operator and decision-maker in the way you were just describing, so I’ve got no beef with Mr Javid.

But equally I don’t think that’s quite right. I think Dominic Cummings, certainly on diagnosis but also trying to galvanise direction of travel, was much needed, some grit in the oyster. I think if you look at some of the things he said – and we may come on to this – but the obvious one I think of is the osmosis between professions from outside government in government.

Funnily enough Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance are great examples of this. I mean, when we came on to the vaccine trials and all the rest of it, having someone who has not only been a scientist, who knows how government works, but also been in a major multinational, taking a drug from trials to commercialisation, I mean, it’s just gold dust. I think Chris Whitty was superb as well. And one of the things I think Dom Cummings had noted and observed is sometimes Whitehall can feel a bit like a closed shop.

So I want to give you a sense of which I think he correctly identified some of the structural challenges without getting into the “he said, she said”, frankly soap opera of Westminster bubble politics.

The broader question you raise about whether he took – that Boris Johnson was a puppet, I’m afraid I don’t find that a serious allegation. I think Boris Johnson certainly relied on his key advisers. By the way I think you have to if you’re going to get through the work, particularly in a pandemic. I don’t think, looking back at prime ministers past or present, if I look at Theresa May or if I look at Tony Blair and the role of his chief of staff, his director of communications, it is natural. And if you present me with something, a specific scenario, I’m happy to comment on it.

But – and Boris, just like anyone else who occupies that incredible role – and I feel some empathy with anyone who has done the job of Prime Minister, because I covered it for a month and I think that made me a better Secretary of State because I could see what the pressures were that the Prime Minister has to deal with – but you have constantly got this challenge of wanting to control the levers that affect government policy but also knowing that to run an effective government you need to delegate. And, of course, you should delegate fundamentally through your secretaries of state and your ministers, but you also delegate with advice and reliance on your special advisers, just as you do through senior members of the civil servants. That is natural and proper. And I don’t think – I just don’t accept the characterisation that there was some sort of puppet regime.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Raab, let’s move on and look at the early months of the pandemic.

Lady Hallett: Before we do, can I just issue another assurance, as I did yesterday.

Mr Raab, when we’re looking at whether or not there was a toxic at – it’s not from some prurient interest that we want to hear rude words or anything, it is to see whether or not there was anything wrong in the decision-making process, and that’s why we’re asking the questions.

Mr Dominic Raab: I understand why you are asking the questions, Chair. I totally respect it. I’m not suggesting – but we also know that there is, if you like, a parallel soap opera in the media that will play out these things and magnify –

Lady Hallett: I understand.

Mr Dominic Raab: And I just – you know, I want to give you honest answers, candid examples. I want to give the best evidence I can for the bereaved. And fundamentally, this is a lessons learned exercise, I want us to understand where we’ve just got political noise and where we’ve got substantive issues. And let me try and assist the Inquiry as best I can.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Mr O’Connor: Let’s turn to the chronology, Mr Raab, your witness statement sets out in detail what you were being told, what you were doing in the first few weeks of 2020, I’m really talking about January and very early February here. We may come back to some of this detail, but is it fair to say that at least two of the things you were principally concerned with in that time regarding the pandemic were, first of all, amendments to the UK travel advice for China, considering whether or not to make amendments and, over time, making those amendments, and also dealing with various issues regarding the repatriation of British nationals?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes, to the extent that my job and role covered the pandemic, there is a whole string of other things, every crisis in the – you can imagine what I was like then compared to now –

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, and I think I was clear in my question that I was just asking you about those matters.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes. And I think the other thing, If I may just say, on travel advice, trying to explain throughout government, which may be helpful just to echo here, the difference between travel advice and changes that are made to it compared to, for example, border restrictions, and that these are different decisions for different purposes and actually we’re legally constrained, I’m sure we’ll flesh this out, in the way that that takes place. But yes, of course, looking at that very carefully and ultimately taking advice from the CMO and others on that.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. You also detail, Mr Raab, that of the two COBR meetings that took place during January that we have heard some detail about, you didn’t attend the first meeting, you sent one of your MPS to attend that meeting, but you did attend the second meeting on 29 January.

Now I want to move just a week or so forward in the chronology, because the Inquiry has heard evidence about a meeting that took place on 4 February between the Prime Minister and Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer. This wasn’t a meeting as far as we know that you were at, you may not have heard anything about it, that’s one of the questions I’m going to ask you, but what we’ve heard, first of all, this was the first time that Chris Whitty briefed the Prime Minister relating to Covid, and that in summary what Chris Whitty told the Prime Minister was that there was a reasonable chance that there would be a pandemic in this country involving between 100,000 and 300,000 deaths if the Covid-19, which was then in China, spread internationally and became a pandemic.

We’ve heard from Chris Whitty that that range, the 100,000 to 300,000, was not intended, nor was it presented, to the Prime Minister as a sort of formal reasonable worst-case scenario, they were intended as an indication of the seriousness of the situation if a pandemic of this new infection were to emerge.

Now, I’m sure you’ll agree with me, first of all, that that was a very grave piece of advice that Chris Whitty was giving to the Prime Minister?

Mr Dominic Raab: Of course it is, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: May I ask whether you were aware of that meeting or what it was that Chris Whitty had conveyed to the Prime Minister at it?

Mr Dominic Raab: I can’t recollect, but it’s not remotely unusual that I wouldn’t have been at that meeting.

Counsel Inquiry: No, I’m not suggesting it was. I simply want to understand –

Mr Dominic Raab: No.

Counsel Inquiry: – whether you were or whether you had understood it at the time.

Mr Dominic Raab: No.

Counsel Inquiry: Let’s go, if we may, to paragraph 58 of your witness statement on page 18.

You describe there that in fact on the day of that meeting you went on a pre-arranged trip, undertaking your official duties as Foreign Secretary, to Australia, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, and you were gone for about a week, as we can see there.

I think it’s also right to say that later in February, after your return from that trip, you went on a family holiday or a personal trip skiing; is that right?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah, I mean, that is correct. I mean, in fairness, if you’re taking the whole chronology, I mean, you know – and this is the life of any modern Foreign Secretary – I was in Brussels the first week of January, in the US and Canada the second, third week or around the same time I’m in Paris –

Counsel Inquiry: I’m just going to interrupt you, Mr Raab, because we have got limited time.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes, but I think it’s important, because I think I know where you’re going with this. The – if I may, just to very briefly say, I went to Australia, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, vital countries for the UK’s foreign policy and, as it turned out, the relationships we needed to service during Covid. And again, first week of March I was back on the road to Oman, Istanbul and Saudi. That is the job of any modern Foreign Secretary.

Lady Hallett: Don’t worry, I don’t think Mr O’Connor is going to suggest you were on jollies, Mr Raab.

Mr Dominic Raab: Glad to hear it.

Lady Hallett: Just wait for the question and then he’ll make it clear.

Mr O’Connor: The question I want to ask you, Mr Raab, focuses on this time in February where, as we have seen, first of all, you did this official tour to Australia and to those other countries, and secondly, after you got back, I think you have agreed, you went on a family holiday. What we can read into that, alongside the fact that at the beginning of that month the Prime Minister had been told of this grave news about the Covid pandemic, which one might have thought, and certainly with hindsight now we can perhaps see, demanded a considerable upgrading of the government’s response.

Were you aware at that time of anyone suggesting to you either that it might not have been a good idea for you to leave the country, that you were needed perhaps in your role as First Secretary to be involved in work towards preparing for the pandemic, or that it wouldn’t be advisable for you to take holiday during that period?

Mr Dominic Raab: So three points. First of all, of course the advice that you cite from Mr – from Professor Whitty to the Prime Minister was hedged with all sorts of caveats and uncertainty, and as a common theme of the pandemic we had potential scenarios with evidence which was hedged. And I think at a range of moments and quite – you’ll have to ask the Prime Minister, former Prime Minister, I’m sure you will – where you’ve got formative evidence coming through, which is still being tested – and at what point you make a go/no go decision, whatever decision that may be. So – and I think when I’ve looked at the minutes from the meeting that you referred to with the Prime Minister, I think it’s hedged with, again, all those caveats and uncertainties. So I think, first of all, we need to understand that you take the decision when you’ve got sufficient evidence, and indeed when the CMO advises sufficient evidence to take actionable decisions.

In terms of my travel, just to be really clear, of course right the way through the pandemic, if it was either unwise, unsafe, for Covid reasons, to leave, I would have been umbilically linked to the CMO in terms of chains of communication and we would have been advised. I was not advised not to go. Indeed, I think it was very important both for relations with all of these countries and relations that we would have to tap, whether it was for PPE, whether it was on vaccine discussions or whatever it may be, that we did have those relations. Particularly, as I say, with the likes of Australia, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, but also frankly all of them.

In relation to the week away, as you can I think see from the chronology, being Foreign Secretary is a pretty gruelling agenda, and that comes with the territory, but equally you will have noticed – and I’m sure you’ve got and seen and digested the FCDO corporate chronology that was sent on 23 December 2022 which details, and I’m very happy to go through it in laborious detail if it’s helpful, but tell me if it isn’t – all of the decisions, the communications and the meetings that I conducted during the February half term, which you referred to, when I was away.

Again, whether you’re away on very rare leave that you get as Foreign Secretary or whether it’s because you’re travelling on business and you need to stay in touch with what’s going on in Westminster, I mean, that’s just bread and butter, but at all moments when I was needed I was there and certainly directing what my department needed to do – if it wasn’t easily delegated, which, again, you need to do during a pandemic and, actually, in terms of business as usual.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Raab, one of the questions that this Inquiry will have to consider is whether that month of February was spent properly by the government not on business as usual but on understanding and preparing its response to the Covid pandemic.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, do you think that enough was done during February, both by you and others, or not?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes. But, look, as you say, it’s with the benefit of hindsight.

The reality is at all moments we’re looking for enough evidence. And credible decisive persuasive overwhelming evidence, not just strands of evidence here and there, not just theses which haven’t properly been tested but conclusive evidence on which you can act. It’s actionable evidence. And ultimately we had to rely on the advisers for that.

Now, we – a whole range of contingency planning was under way but one of the things that was important was that the government didn’t seize up, paralysed, because we could see evolving a pandemic or an emergency, whether it was limited to China, engulfing the world, to the extent that it affected the UK. We needed to try to function as best we could whilst preparing for that. But again you come back to the same point, contingency planning without knowing with sufficient evidence what the threat was, you just end up rewriting it or … and I think one of the things that I learnt during this process is that when it comes to plans during a crisis, this is probably true in war time, but that’s not my experience, in terms of direct war time for the UK, and certainly in an emergency like the pandemic, is you need to try and stay in what I call perpetual beta. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the phrase, but if you’re testing a drug or technology, the last test you do before you put it to market is with real-time users. So you have your plan but you are constantly testing and reiterating and refining the prototype.

I think we and Whitehall needs to get much, much better at that. And curiously one of the people that warned most about that, and I don’t need to be the apologist for Dominic Cummings, was Mr Cummings.

I think your broader point, though, was: in retrospect, was February a decisive month? I think it was. But you can see that in hindsight – and it was the tipping point where we really learnt more sufficiently about the pandemic to tip the balance into, okay, well, now we’ve at least got enough evidence to take some actionable decision. And I think that’s the conclusion I came to.

Counsel Inquiry: Well, Mr Raab, we can all think of our own management speak to describe these indications, but –

Mr Dominic Raab: Sorry, with the greatest of respect, it’s not management speak, it’s science, and the people that have looked at, for example, forecasting, people have looked at why decisions get made that are wrong, both in government and outside, people like Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize – so not just “management speak” in the pejorative terms – people like Philip Tetlock, who have looked at how you improve, would say you need to strike this balance between moving forward and making decisions and, if you like, digesting the evidence.

So I think it’s – and by the way, if it comes to a piece of learning for this Inquiry about how government works, I think it is probably the single most important thing, and I don’t think you should be quite so dismissive, if I may say so with respect, as “management speak”. I’m trying to give you a thoughtful, considered answer about how government works.

Counsel Inquiry: Can I ask you a direct question, Mr Raab: are you telling the Inquiry that at the beginning of February the government had inadequate evidence with which to take further steps that it could and should have taken?

Mr Dominic Raab: So when I – we constantly peppered Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance with these kind of questions, and then there was frustration with the science itself, not just the evidence we were getting or the propositions we were getting, but – and I think the – I had a long conversation with both Chris and Patrick, who I think very usefully said, you know, you can’t think of the science as something which is decisive and then set in stone – which is why I come on to the perpetual beta point – it is something constantly being tested. And the point I’m making is I don’t think we have definitive – a definitive enough answer about what the pandemic was doing, the rate at which it was spreading, what it would mean for the UK, let alone the other knock-on questions that inevitably need to be asked, which is: what does that mean for the NHS, in particular ventilator beds in ICU? And also another big question: how long can you credibly stay in lockdown in a liberal democracy like the UK?

So I think what I’m trying to help you with is that I’m sure with the benefit of hindsight if we took a decision on, you know, whatever date it was, you can always ask: weren’t you versed enough the day before to take that decision? That’s the luxury of hindsight. I think we genuinely tried to move decisively at the point at which the evidence was compelling and we wouldn’t then just be buffeted between competing evidence that would show up the next day or the next week. And that’s the balance.

Lady Hallett: Mr O’Connor, we’re going to pause there.

Mr O’Connor: Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: 3.35.

Mr Raab, we will complete your evidence today, I guarantee, but we do take a break.

(3.20 pm)

(A short break)

(3.35 pm)

Lady Hallett: Mr O’Connor.

Mr O’Connor: Mr Raab, I would like to ask you a few questions about the first lockdown decision that was taken towards the end of March 2020.

May we go to paragraph 106 of your statement, please, on page 32. The second sentence of that paragraph, Mr Raab, you state that you cannot remember exactly when you found out that the lockdown was going to be imposed but that it didn’t come as a surprise. May we take it, therefore, that you weren’t sort of minutely involved in all of the discussions and meetings and so on that led up to it?

Mr Dominic Raab: Well, it depends what you mean by “minutely”.

I think the point I was trying to convey is that there are a series of incremental steps by which it became predictable or at least foreseeable that we would have to lock down, as a necessity, and therefore it didn’t take me by surprise. Equally, I’m not quite sure of the decisive moment where someone said to me, “By the way, you know this is going to mean a full-blown lockdown”, so – but I think it was an – I think it was more an incremental moving towards rather than – although I’m sure to the public it appeared like a cliff-edge decision, it felt from the inside like an incremental series of steps that we inevitably ended up taking.

Counsel Inquiry: I wanted to ask that, because if we look at the sentence before it and the sentence after it, you say that by 23 March, which was of course the date that the lockdown was announced, the Prime Minister had already tested out the various components of a lockdown with Cabinet and with Cabinet subcommittees. And then the sentence two further on you say:

“The various elements had been the subject of technical discussions in COBR or subcommittee meetings already.”

The evidence the Inquiry has heard is that the period of, let’s say, ten days leading up to the lockdown decision was a little bit less mechanical than that, there were crisis meetings, disagreements, meetings with the Prime Minister where he gave different people different understandings of what he was going to do, saying that he wanted to be the mayor from Jaws, discussions with Sadiq Khan over the weekend just before saying he couldn’t decide whether to have a lockdown or not, worrying about the economic aspects.

No doubt a very serious decision, very serious trade-offs, but not quite the sort of cool, calm, everything had been carefully thought through, all the aspects had been looked at in different subcommittees running up to that decision.

Can you tell us that something different happened, or were you not as close to the decision-making as others?

Mr Dominic Raab: I’m not sure that – well, I was close to the bits that I was personally involved in, for example, the global travel advisory was in place on 17 March, just by way of example.

I’m not sure taking an incremental approach is inconsistent with a Prime Minister who, if that was your reflection, took a rather Hegelian approach to making decisions (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), and that was actually very commonly what he did, both in meetings and I suppose in his thought processes, and I don’t think – I mean, people will have different ways of doing that, they can be inductive, deductive, but I think testing viewpoints and possible outcomes actually is quite a healthy thing to do.

And I think one of the things misunderstood about Boris Johnson, and we all have failings for sure, is he was much more open to hearing contrary views than some other prime ministers that either I’ve worked for or – you can think back over time.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, thank you, Mr Raab.

Mr Dominic Raab: Therefore, if he wanted to test something, he would often want to hear a counterpoint. That doesn’t mean he was wavering or vacillating. I mean, it might have done, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it. It means he wanted to stress test, kick the tyres.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Raab, several of the witnesses who were involved in this decision-making have expressed the view to the Inquiry, with hindsight, that that first lockdown decision should have been made earlier than it was, perhaps by a period of a week or a little more. What’s your view about that?

Mr Dominic Raab: So I’ve heard it and I’ve listened to it and we thought about this at the time. One of the big challenges was working out how long you could realistically credibly lock down for, because you need to do so with the overarching goodwill of the country and the stamina of the country for a full-blown lockdown, and we asked Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance about this, that’s a huge variable. And the challenge, as I think you’ll have heard and everyone will be familiar with, the issue with lockdown was to try to protect the NHS, particularly the ICU, flatten the peak of the virus, and protect the NHS being from overwhelmed. There were all sorts of other considerations but that was a critical one.

If you go too early with your lockdown, the risk is you end up having to come out too early or it frays. And I’ve heard people say we should have gone down earlier, and it’s an easy thing to say with retrospect. But do they also answer the question: does that mean we’ll come out of lockdown early? And if not, does – can they answer the question – I’m just, it’s a rhetorical question, really – about – all the other consequential questions about compliance and what that would have meant.

Actually during the lockdown compliance of the British people, I think because they understood why, compliance was extremely high, particularly for a liberal democracy which is used to exerting its freedoms. And I think that was partly because the case was clear and that was partly because we could present the case as clear.

So I’m not being dismissive about other viewpoints about this, I just think you have got to answer other questions about stamina of the British people for a lockdown of that nature.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. And all the factors you’ve just listed which were in play at the time have all been considered by the witnesses who the Inquiry have heard from, scientists, decision-makers. Several of them, Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty, have expressed the view, carefully reasoned, that, knowing what they know now, the lockdown should have been earlier. I’m interested to know your view on that.

Mr Dominic Raab: Knowing what we know now, look, possibly. I’d need to look at all the data and the evidence.

What Chris and Patrick did, which I think was very useful, is they often had, if you like, a matrix of, what we’ve got to think about is four things above all – there’s always other, but four things – Covid impact, non-Covid health impact, economic impact and social impact. And we would often test – and I certainly would try to test with them – those four things. And the risk of course, in an emergency, is all of your mind is on the Covid impact, and that’s understandable given it was – given the huge loss of life, but you’ve also got to think about the opportunity cost or the opportunity losses, including human loss of life, of those other three areas of the matrix.

So, with retrospect, that’s for the committee to decide and the Inquiry to decide.

For my – I think the most important thing I can say is at the time there was just so much that was fluid in terms of the evidence and too many questions, and you can’t wait for perfect knowledge. So in that, to that – and I’m all for making a decision, which is why that point about perpetual beta, sometimes you’ll need to go with your, let’s say, 90% formed view but just recognise that you’re going to have to iterate around it.

But I actually think that if you look at the consequences of the timing you could probably – and I know a columnist would make the argument and others would make the argument – that actually, you know, we locked down too much. I’m not saying this is my view. But because of the cost to the economy, because of the languishing effects of the non-Covid NHS backlogs, because of the impacts on our children of shutting schools, which I was very mindful of. So I’m just saying, you know, when I look back, I’m very conscious that we made the best decisions with the science as fluid as it was at that point in time, and I think that’s the best that you can in good faith do.

Counsel Inquiry: Let’s move, Mr Raab, to the slightly later period when, as we’ve said, Boris Johnson became ill and you stood in for him.

In summary, the chronology was that Mr Johnson announced that he’d tested positive on 27 March, he went into hospital a week or so later on 5 April, and went into intensive care on the 6th. That was a Monday. And is it right that it was that Monday that you commenced deputising for him and that went on until he was discharged on 12 April, and then for a couple of weeks after while he recuperated until 25 April?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Are those the dates?

Mr Dominic Raab: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, if we look at paragraph 125 of your statement, Mr Raab, on page 38, you describe the circumstances in which, as it were, it was you who deputised for him and not someone else.

You say – I’m looking towards the bottom of that paragraph:

“… I had had a conversation with the Prime Minister in which it was made clear that if he was to be indisposed, I [that is you] would step in and deputise for him.”

I’m going to ask you some sort of questions about the constitutional situation –

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – and how developed the planning was.

Are you able to help us with whether it was routine for prime ministers to have someone identified who would deputise for them if they were indisposed, or as far as you’re aware was that unusual?

Mr Dominic Raab: No, I think it was unusual. But for completeness, there are all sorts of security and national security scenarios which, forgive me, because of the propriety and sensitivity, I won’t to go into detail, but just to give you a flavour, where whether it’s because of indisposition or lack of availability you make sure you’ve got cover.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. But you at any event had had that conversation.

Was that – I won’t press you on the detail for obvious reasons, but was that discussion limited to that sort of national security situation or was it a broader conversation?

Mr Dominic Raab: So I can’t remember all the details of it, but the truth is when I was appointed Foreign Secretary and First Secretary, the PM was very clear: “I’m appointing you First Secretary so that you’ve got my back and that if ever it’s required you can cover for me.”

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Dominic Raab: There are some regular routine things, like PMQs, that just, you know – but – I mean, that’s not at the most acute end of the seriousness that we’re talking about now. But it just logically follows from that.

In terms of contingency planning around that eventuality, no, I think it was pretty sparse.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Dominic Raab: I was effectively told on – really told on five minutes’ notice.

Counsel Inquiry: Let’s move, Mr Raab, because that was going to be my next question, if we look on to the next page, paragraphs 126 and 127, there you discuss meetings that you had with Helen MacNamara, the Deputy Cabinet Secretary, and Mark Sedwill about how this was to work.

We have heard from Helen MacNamara that, to use your words, the planning was sparse. I mean, to use others of her words, “they were making it up as they went along”. You raise questions as to, well, is it appropriate for you to chair Cabinet.

Give us an idea from your perspective as to how clear or unclear it was as to how you were to do this job?

Mr Dominic Raab: Well, the first thing, not clear at all. There’s no manual, there’s no guidance. I was told on five minutes’ notice. In fact I’d given, I think, the press conference – you know we had those daily press conferences where the scientists would speak, a senior minister would speak, you take questions and tweets from the public, and then I think I was informed literally as I came out of that.

I think there were a number of things that were on my mind. One, just steady the ship. It’s a big deal. I also noticed at a human level, just as we all had experience of this awful pandemic, I knew a lot of people would be – in the Cabinet would be personally very worried about what this meant for the personal condition of the Prime Minister. I know it’s easy to discount that if you’re in the public at large or, you know, with the media and what have you, but I think there’s a lot of that. You want the government to respond in the right way and the Cabinet to respond in the right way. I think there’s an element of reassurance to give the public, so there is that, so I think I did a clip to camera and we basically emphasised that message.

I thought – and then there’s all the work that’s going on, from the strategic preparation for the – I think it was the five tests for how we come out of lockdown., I knew that the PM wanted all of that work being done for when we would be able to do that.

So there was that strategic work.

There was all the minutiae, operational minutiae of stuff going on in every department. You know, we had a good Cabinet, we good secretaries of state, I wanted to trust them to do that job. They would certainly not have welcomed an overly micromanaging step-in First Secretary, I was very conscious of that, but I did think it was important, for example, to get them together, to get the team together, and just say, “Come on, we’ve got this, PM is going to be fine” – fingers crossed, which was all we knew at that time – “let’s make sure when he comes back conscious we’ve all done a good job, both individually and as a team”.

I think there was some nervousness. I was told no – no one who wasn’t a Prime Minister had chaired a Cabinet before. I’ve got to say, I thought that’s not really the thing that matters right now, although I understood and respect – by the way, Helen and Mark – Helen MacNamara and Mark Sedwill – good colleagues, I respected them I – you know – but I thought the right thing to do for morale, both of Cabinet and the government, was say – just to get everyone together and have a bit of a team talk, and also just to check who was worried about whatever, and there may be other things we hadn’t thought about, because there hadn’t been a huge amount of contingency planning.

We ended up having a Cabinet discussion or a Cabinet meeting. Fine, I think we had couple of those in relatively short order. And I think it was, just at that human level, important.

But the most important thing was to make sure that you could show government was working, that there was a government functioning, that there was a First Secretary that was in charge. And I suppose, again, at another human level, I didn’t want anyone saying, well, Dom Raab is enjoying this too much, because (a) I wasn’t and (b), you know, I was there to do a job, and I felt very loyal, as I have done to every Prime Minister I have served, to make sure it was done as professionally as possible.

Counsel Inquiry: In terms of learning lessons, Mr Raab, and particularly in the context of pandemic preparedness, what happened in 2020 is perhaps, it wasn’t unforeseeable, if a pandemic sweeps the country, that one of those affected may be the Prime Minister. Do you think there ought to be clearer guidance in place in time for the next pandemic in case the same thing happens again?

Mr Dominic Raab: I think it – again, I think it probably would be worth doing. Although – so I’d say two things. One, surely you should have some discussion and some principles and you should avail the current Prime Minister and whoever there is – whoever their nominated deputy is, whether it’s his First Secretary or Deputy Prime Minister, there ought to be some kind of conversation about what’s expected if the Prime Minister becomes indisposed other than for travel.

Having said that – again, it’s not for me to say it, but I listened to some of the evidence, whether it’s political evidence from SPADs like Mr Cummings or Fiona – we actually did a reasonable job during that four, five weeks. I think all the things that needed to happen, did happen. We were well advanced on the readiness with the five tests about how eventually we would come out of lockdown. And I’m not – again, I don’t want to overstate this, I think with a pandemic and a crisis, it’s useful to have some handrails, so yes, a bit more lessons learned and a bit more contingency planning would be useful, but actually our system worked and, as was often the case, this was British pragmatism and the – if you like, the informal conventions that inform how we make decisions actually did see us through.

So yes, a bit more codification, probably, but actually, I don’t think we did too bad a job, given the circumstances.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Just briefly, if we look at the bottom of this page, we will see just at the bottom of paragraph 129 you refer there to “the Easter review”, I think you’ve mentioned it just in passing a few minutes ago.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: This was one of the features, wasn’t it, of the four or five weeks that you were at the helm. Just briefly expand on what that was all about and –

Mr Dominic Raab: We had five tests for – so the Easter review was, having gone into lockdown, you want to make sure that people feel like there’s some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, and, therefore, the Easter review would be that moment. And it would be judged against five criteria, which included everything from the state of the NHS, in particular ICU, the R level, so the transmission rate, through to the impact on the economy.

So I think trying to make sure you’ve got some good, clear benchmarks. And frankly, and this is a common theme, I don’t know whether you’ll get a chance to come on to it, but the data to inform those benchmarks so that that Easter review could be meaningful.

Counsel Inquiry: Let’s look at another document, if we may, please, Mr Raab. It’s INQ000136763.

This was a review of the culture in Number 10 and the Cabinet Office that was undertaken. If we can look at the whole page, we can see the date there, May 2020. It was undertaken by Helen MacNamara and Martin Reynolds.

We’ve heard evidence about both this review and the issue that prompted it, Mr Raab. In summary, problems with working both in Number 10 and the Cabinet Office, division between the two, unhappiness amongst at least some of those working there.

If we look at page 3 of the document, paragraph 2 of the review, a paragraph we’ve looked at before, problems listed there, not enough grip in the Cabinet Office, plans not being drawn together, not enough scrutiny, Number 10 is strong but not pulling in the same direction, sometimes the systems got flooded with unprioritised demands, culture isn’t getting the best from people. A couple of lines down there is a particular issue with junior women being talked over or ignored.

As we saw, one of the phrases that was used in the preparation of this document, although it didn’t find its way into the final draft, was describing what was going on as a so-called “superhero bunfight”.

This review was done in early May, so a week or two after Mr Johnson had come back, but one infers that these problems must have been evidencing themselves during the time that you were deputising for Mr Johnson. Were you aware of them at the time?

Mr Dominic Raab: Oh, I mean, look, I don’t necessarily agree with all of this, and I don’t propose going through it line by line but I think they’ve lifted out quite a few really salient themes around roles and responsibilities particularly, and accountability. The feeling often, whether it’s in normal times or in a crisis, is you yank a lever, whether it’s from Number 10 or the Cabinet Office, and you’re sort of waiting for something actually to happen. That nexus between authority and accountability I think is a very good example.

I’m not sure I agree with all of it, in the sense that – and by the way, I don’t think that those who conducted this review came and talked to me, which is I think itself quite telling, not that I would have disagreed with some of these issues. But I think the one thing I would say is, in any crisis, it’s not going to be a manicured operation. I mean, you know, in the Foreign Office we had the Thomas Cook insolvency, and we had the repatriation efforts, I mean, and all – you know, the Foreign Office deals with crisis management – it is never perfectly manicured, and there will be certainly people who feel bruised by the pressure of it, and sometimes that will be because someone has behaved inappropriately, I get that, but there is also emergency conditions which create a tension and a combustibility, which I think we need to acknowledge as a given, however perfect the structure is.

So – but I think the bit that I would alight on is endless meetings without a clear enough agenda, with papers focused on the agenda, with an exam question which leads to delivery, with a clear enough SRO, a senior reporting officer, who is actually going to say, if it doesn’t happen, why not. And preferably to give you an early heads-up.

I think there is a delivery function challenge in Whitehall more generally but I think it shows up during a crisis. One thing I’ve always noticed is how often the CFO role and the COO role, so the chief financial officer and the chief operating officer, are often merged. Which to me – as the Secretary of State in a big department, I think having a freestanding chief operating officer to deal with both long-term strategic plans but also the firefighting, why is something going wrong, can we fix it, I – again – and that’s even before you get into what you do in crisis mode.

Counsel Inquiry: Just a very practical question relating to this, those four or five weeks that you were deputising, were you actually based in the Cabinet Office or Number 10 or were you still working from the Foreign Office?

Mr Dominic Raab: I would come into Number 10 first thing and do the equivalent of the early morning meetings, stay on for any imperative business, but then I went back to the Foreign Office, partly because it was just as easy to work from there, it’s literally a stone’s throw because there’s a back entrance from the Foreign Office to Number 10, but also because – I was very mindful of this per se – if it didn’t make any difference to the effectiveness of what I did, I was very mindful of not looking like I was camping out in Number 10 while my Prime Minister was ill disposed.

Counsel Inquiry: Let me move on, Mr Raab, and ask you about a slightly different matter. For these purposes could we go to page 63 of your witness statement, please, paragraph 215. Do you have it?

Mr Dominic Raab: 215?

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, this is a paragraph where you’re discussing the scientific evidence, you’ve already mentioned your discussions with Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, I want to ask you about a sentence about six or seven leans down, you said:

“I never felt that anything was missing and I am confident that we received a range of perspectives throughout.”

One of the issues the Inquiry has been addressing is whether sufficient economic advice, economic modelling for example, was provided to decision-makers, and it may or may not be that that was one of the things that you had in mind when you wrote that sentence.

Let me give you an example of the evidence the Inquiry has heard. Ben Warner, who in fact you mention in that paragraph, you were obviously – he was obviously known to you, he said in his witness statement:

“The biggest absence throughout the pandemic was the lack of economic modelling in decision-making.”

So can we ask you for your view, please. As it were, let’s park the advice that came through Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance and SAGE and so on.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: The question is whether that was sufficiently balanced or added to by economic advice. Mr Warner expresses a strong view that it wasn’t. What was your experience?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah, look, I think it’s a very good point. I mean, just on the narrow point you’re making that I said I never felt anything was missing and I’m confident we received a range of perspectives throughout, I’m talking about the distillation of SAGE’s view –

Counsel Inquiry: I understand that –

Mr Dominic Raab: – on the pandemic, just to be clear.

Counsel Inquiry: – which is why I –

Mr Dominic Raab: I get it. But I wasn’t talking about the whole piece.

Look, I think we’ve got this four-point matrix, impact of Covid, non-Covid health impacts, economic and social. It is certainly true to say that in the lion’s share of meetings which were either Covid-O or S or Cabinet, that there’s disproportionate emphasis on the Covid health implications, and that’s natural in a crisis, and that’s the purpose of what Chris and Patrick were doing and SAGE.

I think it is also – and, by the way, I’ve read Ben’s evidence, his written evidence, I agree with – I think I’d struggle to disagree with anything he said certainly at the point of principle, about not having enough groupthink – not having enough challenges to groupthink. And particularly if all of the Covid perspective is crowding out some of those other things, and you’ve had a sense of my concern around – I was very concerned about closing schools. I was very concerned that if we locked down too early we wouldn’t have the stamina to see it through and flatten the curve and protect the NHS. Did we always get those perspectives? I think one of the challenges ever since – well, it’s probably been true for all prime ministers since World War II, but you’ve always got this challenge or this tension between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor – under Blair it was called the TB-GBs, and we all know what went – and it’s true, the tension is there, because the Treasury is such an authoritative place. I suspect quite a lot of the analysis of the economic impact, so in that matrix the economic implications, was discussed bilaterally probably at length, with lots of advisers from Number 10 and the Treasury there, and the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. Was it filtered through properly enough to Cabinet to me to – I’m not sure. Certainly, one of the things the way government operates and Whitehall operates, it doesn’t – part of it, of course, is the – how convincing the evidence and analysis is but also it’s frankly, if you like, the fact you regurgitate over like cud certain consistent themes, and that becomes the benchmark or the bench point that you work to.

I think that the concern with all of the direct Covid impacts, as serious as they were, was like that a little bit, in the sense that we just eclipsed the group discussion of some of the wider economic implications.

I also can see the challenge, we wouldn’t have been able to do both to the same degree, so, you know, you choose how you prioritise the time. I also see that the PM and the Chancellor – and I think this is true successively, learning the lessons from the TB-GBs – we’re trying to make sure they would go into that room with a common view, is it is awful if you have a Prime Minister and a Chancellor disagree. And I think the other thing you wanted to try and avoid is it just being the Chancellor and the Health Secretary constantly at odds.

So I think the comments are well made, I think we probably would have wanted some more buttressing economic data sifted and filtered through in a meaningful way in which – you know, on two sides of A4, three sides of A4, not just further volumes.

But I also understand that trying to get the right balance between discussion that’s helpful and that doesn’t just create, if you like, systematic tensions which stop you making decisions.

So I’m trying to give you a full answer. I’m not disagreeing with what you say and what Ben is saying on this.

Counsel Inquiry: On a practical level, and this is something Mr Warner and others have said, there was a disparity between the SAGE advice, epidemiological advice, going through a particular process and generating SAGE consensus statements which were available to you and your colleagues –

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – I’m not talking for the moment being published, more generally –

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – and an absence of similar economic analysis as you say being made available on a two or three-page statement to allow those trade-offs to be understood when it came to NPI decision-making, and that is perhaps why some have suggested in a future pandemic some idea of an economic SAGE to do a similar job in a different field. Is that –

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes, SAGE did elicit quite a lot of controversy, the Inquiry will have noted, and therefore I think an economic version might just risk amplifying to new levels of consternation.

But the truth is I think you probably would want something as a counterbalance, if you like a ballast, to the SAGE advice. Whether it needs to be a whole new structure, I don’t know.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Let’s move, Mr Raab, to the second lockdown, if we may. For these purposes, let’s look at page 49 of your witness statement.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: In the top two paragraphs, you will see there 156 and 157, you describe the Cabinet meeting on Saturday 31 October. We’ve heard a lot of evidence, again, about the days running up to that meeting and the advice that the Prime Minister had received.

You describe then the meeting, we see at 157 you say the Prime Minister proposed second national lockdown and regret about the tiers not having had time to prove whether they were effective, and, as you say, the fact that the Prime Minister announced the second lockdown later that day.

If we can go on to paragraph 158, you say:

“In respect of the decision to implement the second national lockdown, the CMO’s advice was not binary but reflected a full spectrum of SAGE opinion for this decision, as for other decisions throughout the pandemic.”

The evidence the Inquiry has heard, Mr Raab, is that, for some time before this period, so at least for the whole of October, in fact going back to early September, the SAGE consensus advice had in fact been that there needed to be some sort of lockdown.

So what do you mean by saying the CMO’s advice was not binary?

Mr Dominic Raab: So I don’t remember ever Chris Whitty giving binary advice to the extent there was only really one option and they don’t admit of points along a spectrum. I don’t have the advice with me and I can’t recall the precise contours of SAGE on the second national lockdown, but there was – I mean, we lived in an operational world where there was always competing arguments. And even if there weren’t competing arguments on the science, the policy options of what you might do which would be effective as a result of the science would – and normally you had both, and you probably also had one or other scientist finding their views – their views finding their way into the media. So it certainly always felt like there were options.

And, in fairness, I think the point I’m trying to make about Chris Whitty is even when he made a strong recommendation, I think he was intellectually and professionally honest enough to say, “I’m not saying there is one set view, I’m saying that, whether it’s the consensus view” – and there’s a difference between consensus and unanimity – “my recommended view is this” – he might say it more or less strongly – “these are the implications, but I’m also conscious that there would be costs as well”. I mean, I thought we had good rounded conversations.

And Chris got the, I think, balance right between giving clear advice but not for closing the idea that there weren’t alternatives that could be meaningfully considered.

Counsel Inquiry: Can I ask you about a sentence one or two lines further down?

Mr Dominic Raab: Sure.

Counsel Inquiry: You say:

“There had been positive developments in relation to the vaccine and there seemed to be grounds to hope it was coming soon.”

Just remembering we’re at 31 October here, you’re not suggesting, are you, that the vaccine could somehow have made a difference as to whether a lockdown was needed in October/November 2020?

Mr Dominic Raab: I don’t think I’m suggesting – I don’t think I was suggesting that. But, again, I’d need to look again at what we were being told.

I mean, the minute that – the truth is the only way through the pandemic, as it became clear as we – as it evolved, was going to be either a test and trace system, of a markedly different quality and efficacy of the one we had, or a vaccine. And so we were constantly trying to see, as well as deal with the short and medium term, what was coming down the line. And, again, given this point about national stamina, when the vaccine was incredibly likely to come – or plausibly likely to come in, and therefore Chris and others and Patrick would update us on how the trials were going, and that itself is – was fascinating and I learnt a huge amount from them on that and indeed that process, and I think sometimes we wanted some good news, and progress on the trials was clearly of that order.

I don’t think I was saying that it would come quickly enough to prevent the December restrictions.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. If we look a little bit further down in the same paragraph you say this:

“There was a strong view that we could not get into a series of rolling lockdowns but rather had to wait and impose any further lockdown, not in order to stop the virus, but to flatten the curve when that became necessary to protect the NHS again …”

And again you say:

“… in order for the vaccines to become available.”

Well, we’ve heard that there were certainly, putting it at that level, two options. One was to have a series of what would be smaller lockdowns which would keep incidence in the population low, the other was to wait until you had to have a lockdown in order to save the NHS. But that would mean various things, one thing would mean that the lockdown when it came would have to be more severe and longer, and the other of course would be that incidence in the population would rise in the meantime, which would mean more people dying, more people contracting Long Covid and so on.

So, looking down at paragraph 159, you say the idea of a circuit breaker was “politically expedient and easy to communicate but we did not consider it was likely to be the best timing or most effective”.

So one understands that there were trade-offs –

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – of course, as in any political decision, but what was the trade-off then between a circuit breaker and waiting until your hand was forced in order to save the NHS?

Mr Dominic Raab: I think the thing I had on my mind is the fatigue that was setting in with lockdowns, or analogous restrictions to lockdowns, and being in and out, I think, as well as being physically, logistically, emotionally exhausting for the country, plus the impact on business. So I’m looking at it in the round. And I’m – you know, whatever the – and I think my view was based on the evidence that we were getting.

I think at that point it was really about just trying to protect the NHS, because the lockdowns aren’t going to make Covid go away, the thing we need is the vaccine, and we’ve discussed that there were signs but obviously nowhere near fruition yet of that coming in a positive way. And just trying to deal with the national exhaustion of lockdown and what it was meaning.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Raab, you talk about national exhaustion, there is also the question of mortality and the national number of people who are dying.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: The circuit breaker, we have heard plenty of scientific evidence, would have kept the incidence of Covid at a lower level, which would have meant fewer people dying. Was that something that was considered at the time?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah, absolutely. And again we relied on the evidence as we had it at the time. But of course we were mindful of that, but you’ve got your four key things which we were constantly focused on, the Covid deaths, the non-Covid health impacts – people would also have their lives and their health at risk if we can’t get the NHS working – we’ve got the social impact, the economic impact as well. Social impact isn’t sort of some fluffy abstract amorphous thing out there, it’s the impact on – mental health impact and all the other impacts of those restrictions.

And the challenge is to look at those in the round and take a balanced decision. So, you know, the idea of going in and out of these circuit breakers I think was actually – even if you could make a rational argument for it, I think, bearing in mind the likely compliance, and if it was tiered measures in particular, the difficulty of policing and enforcing that, coupled with the fact that people’s stamina for it is fraying, I think that’s why I took the view, on balance, that I did.

Counsel Inquiry: We’ve seen evidence of all the briefings the Prime Minister had in the days running up to this decision. There is actually very little in your witness statement covering that period. Can you help us, were you involved in those sort of daily meetings for the week or two before 31 August or not?

Mr Dominic Raab: From recollection I can’t remember. I mean, obviously the most intensive period was during the Prime Minister’s absence. There was then periods after that where I was brought in to do deep dives, and I think partly because of the experience and the trust that I had with the Prime Minister after that situation, the development of the First Secretary role developed further, but I can’t remember off the top of my head quite how involved I was in some of those detailed meetings.

Mr O’Connor: Thank you very much, Mr Raab, those are all my questions for you.

Mr Dominic Raab: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr O’Connor.

Ms Heaven.

Ms Heaven is over there. If you look to the right of the pillar, Mr Raab, she will wave at you in a second.

Questions From Ms Heaven

Ms Heaven: Good afternoon, Mr Raab.

Mr Dominic Raab: Good afternoon.

Ms Heaven: I ask questions on behalf of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru, so it’s a slightly Welsh perspective now, please.

I just have a very few questions for you. It really starts with paragraph 228 of your witness statement, and it’s no criticism of you but I think that’s really the brief explanation you give that touches on DAs. So I’ll just read it out just to remind. I think you’ve got it there on screen:

“In my experience, the arrangements for interaction and joint decision-making between the UK Government and the [devolved administrations] worked reasonably well. I did find that it became irritating as the pandemic went on that Scotland and Wales wanted to do things slightly differently or with different timings for what appeared to be political reasons, but we had regular meetings for the DAs and they were included in the COBR process. Generally speaking, we did take the DAs with us on key decisions. In any event, the differences were fairly minor in the end – staying in lockdown slightly longer, for instance.”

So before I come on to my question, just in terms of your involvement with the DAs, clearly you’ve got lots of other things that you’re doing at various points. I think you were attending some COBRs but clearly not all COBRs; is that fair?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes.

Ms Heaven: Are you attending the four nations meetings with Mr Gove? I don’t think we see you really in those meetings; is that fair?

Mr Dominic Raab: Not – not all of them.

Ms Heaven: No, okay.

So just focusing on what you say about this joint decision-making, and it working reasonably well, and obviously you’ve referenced there COBR, you may be aware the evidence given to the Inquiry by the First Minister for Wales, Mr Drakeford, and indeed by some of the other First Ministers in writing, is that, in their view, there was in fact no joint decision-making forum involving the devolved administrations, and what they say from their perspective is COBR was not really a forum in which the DAs could feed into UK decision-making, not least because they had no control over it, when it met they didn’t get the papers until the last minute, and of course as we know COBR didn’t meet I think between 10 May and 22 September for 2021.

So just thinking about it now, is that not a fair comment, then, from the First Ministers on this issue of joint decision-making, certainly in respect of what was happening in 2021?

Mr Dominic Raab: So first of all may I just say how my heart goes out to all the bereaved of Wales, as it does all the other parts of the UK.

In terms of paragraph 228, I mean, actually I think the operation both of the devolved administrations and the relationship, how they interacted with the UK Government, worked tolerably well. There will always be different views about how much should be centralised and how much should be decentralised. I think that the DAs were fully locked in. I think Michael Gove was tasked with that, I thought he did it very adeptly, and we – I mean, I remember countless meetings where we were all there, not just with the devolved administrations but also the Mayor of London, and they all had the opportunity to feed in, and they did.

So I can understand where I missed all of the focus on the operational function of getting through the pandemic, whether it’s from a Wales perspective, a Scottish perspective or a whole UK perspective. Most of the time I think was, I think in good faith, spent on that. I think’s there’s always an element of politics between the DAs and Westminster; I think it was kept to a tolerable limit.

I think the one thing it really showed up, though, if I may say so, is the value of the United Kingdom when it comes together, whether it’s PPE procurement, whether it’s test and trace, whether it’s the roll-out of the vaccine, how we perform as a team, and I think that was the most important lesson for the United Kingdom and for all the DAs.

Ms Heaven: Well, I’m going to try and keep you on topic, because it is joint decision-making. But just briefly, though, I did reference COBR not meeting 10 May to 22 September. Not having a COBR for four months, that can’t possibly have helped integrate UK decision-making at that high level, thinking of Prime Minister meeting the First Ministers; it can’t possibly have helped, can it?

Mr Dominic Raab: Well, as I said, the – Michael Gove, I think, what I would describe at a working and operation level was constantly locked in. I don’t know whether there were requests made for a COBR that were denied. I wasn’t aware of any. But in any event, often when at operational level things are working smooth, you do need fewer of the very higher level meetings. Why? Because actually you’ve got a good working relationship and some of the creases are being ironed out in a constructive way.

Ms Heaven: I’ll come on, then, to the next topic which is, as you’ve just raised it there, whether there was a concern about high level meetings. Again, just to put it to you to get your perspective, Mr Drakeford has again raised in his evidence – and of course we do see it in the documents before this Inquiry – that he had concerns, and I think there were also concerns from the other First Ministers, about an absence of regular meetings between the Prime Minister and the First Ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and indeed he says, in his perspective, it did undermine the four nations approach to the response to Covid-19.

So just in terms of your state of knowledge then at the time, were you aware that these concerns were held and being expressed by the First Ministers, that they were unhappy about the level of regular access they had to the Prime Minister? So were you aware at the time that this was a concern being raised?

Mr Dominic Raab: No, I don’t think so, not in – not in those terms, no.

Ms Heaven: Okay. Well, indeed in any terms, is this something that you had heard about?

Mr Dominic Raab: Because the natural order of things in terms of the relationship between Westminster, Whitehall and the DAs that there will be various offers and asks and gripes and groans both ways, so there’s not sort of perfect harmony, particularly not during crisis, but actually I think beneath that and beneath the political dimension of that, actually the working-level relationship I think was very resilient. And as I said – and I’m not trying to circumvent, I’m trying to address squarely – the whole point about the teamwork that’s required is that the combination of what the DAs do, what the UK does and what we do together was actually pretty effective, and I’ve given you three concrete examples of where I think that’s borne out in the evidence.

Ms Heaven: I’ll move on then to the next topic, and this is the other issue you raise in that paragraph that I’ve read out to you from your witness statement, and it’s the bit where you say you found it irritating that as the pandemic went on Scotland and Wales wanted to do things slightly differently or with different timings for what appeared to be political reasons.

Obviously I’m not asking you about Scotland, I’ll let others do that, I’m just focusing on Wales.

So in terms of lockdowns, you will be aware that the Welsh autumn firebreak started on 23 October 2020, whereas England’s second national lockdown started on 5 November 2020. So is the fact that Wales went into that autumn lockdown sooner in 2020 something that irritated yourself and the Welsh Government at the time, so that they got in there quicker effectively?

Mr Dominic Raab: No, I don’t think I would give that as the particular example.

Ms Heaven: Okay, that’s not the example.

Okay, so can you identify then what is the example that you’re alluding to there in the paragraph of Welsh Government decision-making which diverged from the UK decision-making which you found irritating?

Mr Dominic Raab: I think, in general, my sense was – and I’d need to go back over the various different meetings and try and decipher the particular – is that there was perfectly good arguments sometimes why they might go a bit slower or a bit quicker or why they wanted something that they hadn’t yet had. Again, I thought Michael Gove and the Prime Minister were very good at trying to reconcile whatever the barrier to that happening was. Sometimes it just felt like, for the sake of doing something out of kilter with the UK Government, that there was a political gain in doing so. But, as I said, the differences were fairly minor and I didn’t attach huge importance to it.

But, look, I think if you think that the Plaid Cymru or the SNP or whoever else were totally absent of political thinking during that process, I think there would be an element of naivety, if I may say.

Ms Heaven: But if I can just press you a bit more, though, is it the case then that you’re not able now to give us a single example?

Mr Dominic Raab: I didn’t in the statement. I was asked for my view about how things worked. I’m not trying to stir up those tensions, I’m just giving you my impression holistically that there were at times a sense that one or other of the DAs wanted to get the jump for political purposes rather than because actually there was a particularly compelling case.

Ms Heaven: Okay.

Well, thank you very much, my Lady, those are my questions.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Heaven, very grateful.

Mr Dayle. Mr Dayle is over there. Are you going to come – are you going to stay there, Mr Dayle?

Don’t worry, he’s used to backs, I’m afraid, Mr Dayle.

The Witness: I will turn and give my evidence to the Inquiry.

Questions From Mr Dayle

Mr Dayle: Very well, thank you, my Lady.

Mr Raab, I ask questions on behalf of the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations, or FEHMO, and I have a handful of questions largely related to the period in April 2020 when you deputised as Prime Minister while Mr Johnson was hospitalised with Covid.

Let me begin hopefully some useful context. The period of 2 to 10 April 2020 is considered by those I represent as an inflection point for addressing disproportionate Covid-19 deaths in black, Asian and minority ethnic community, for two reasons: one, on 2 April Professor Khunti, whom this Inquiry has already heard from, made an intervention to the CMO, Sir Chris Whitty, about what he referred to as signals of disproportionate impact on black, Asian and minority ethnic community for which Sir Chris responded by email on 4 April.

Secondly, a Guardian article of 10 April noted that the first ten doctors to die from Covid-19 were of black, Asian and minority ethnic origin. In your own witness statement you say at paragraph 212, found at page 62:

“We did not have much learning at the early stage on the variable impact of Covid on ethnic minorities.”

So with this contextual background, here are my questions.

Firstly, in the absence of the Prime Minister between 5 and 25 April during his hospitalisation, were you specifically called on to address the matter of disproportionate death rates within black, Asian and minority ethnic community?

Mr Dominic Raab: Specifically by … by who?

Mr Dayle: By your advisers or anyone.

Mr Dominic Raab: No, not specifically in that way. I was, as I’m sure everyone in Cabinet and in government was mindful of some of this data and evidence coming through. The reality was when – and we had quite a few conversations with the chief scientific officers and Chris Whitty and others, and I think even by that point it just – the data and the evidence was too fluid for us to be able to come to any definitive conclusions, let alone actionable policy making, and therefore we were mindful that there was some clearly more examination of this that was required, and I remember asking – being involved in those discussions. But we just didn’t have enough firm enough conclusions, and the science wasn’t firm enough to be able to take it forward.

Mr Dayle: If I could just push you a little bit for a simple clarification on that, and my question would be this: how did this issue come to your attention in real time?

Mr Dominic Raab: Well, I think we could read things like the news reporting. I think because of some of the emerging data it would have either been raised proactively by the CMO or the CSA, or by ministers in any one of the meetings that we were involved in.

Mr Dayle: And you might have adverted to it in your earlier answer, but can I ask you: what was your understanding of this particular phenomenon? What, for example, was your view of what was driving these outcomes?

Mr Dominic Raab: It wasn’t clear. I think the one thing I was mindful of is the importance of being able to disaggregate data in a way which doesn’t lead you up a – down a – it doesn’t give you a false lead. And … but to be honest with you, what I thought my role – and I often do this, particularly outside the area of being Foreign Secretary at that time, which is obviously my portfolio – is to try and test and challenge. I think we did do quite a lot of that on this. So it wasn’t the absence of asking the question, I just don’t think that the evidence had firmed up with the kind of – to use the Inquiry’s terminology – consensus view of SAGE or otherwise. So, sure, there were evidential leads that were emerging, all of which required proper examination, but did that lead to clear consensus? Well, not to my knowledge from the CMO or SAGE.

Mr Dayle: And from that answer, I presume that there were conversations that were ongoing about this issue. Who were you speaking to? And I perhaps mean that in the sense of whether you were speaking to people who were scientific or public health experts or political experts or both.

Mr Dominic Raab: All of the above, and it would typically arise – it was a classic issue that came up in the context of the Covid meetings, the COBR meetings or indeed in Cabinet where people – we were conscious that there was this issue there on which we had incomplete knowledge but we felt was very salient and clearly very serious, and that’s the way it tended to emerge. Someone would ask the question, “But what about this?”, and inevitably the evidence would come back from the scientists that, “Well, we’re not clear yet on the firmness of the evidence”, and therefore it’s difficult to decide what your political or policy answer is going to be.

Until you’ve got the evidence about what exactly is happening, why the disproportionate outcomes to one or other element of your society, I think it is difficult to come up with a definitive policy which doesn’t risk being counterproductive. And I think quite a lot of us – we’d talked about with our four core priorities, there is an element of nervousness about the negative implications of one or other course of action. When the evidence base is not that firm, or hasn’t firmed up yet enough, I think those concerns and that uncertainty is even greater.

Mr Dayle: Can I ask: what, if any, contemporaneous strategic response was pursued regarding this issue?

Mr Dominic Raab: With respect, sir, I think I’ve answered that, which is that I think it was very difficult to come up with a strategic response in the absence of firm evidence, and the risk would have been you would have got your strategy wrong, if your evidence base wasn’t firm enough.

Mr Dayle: So I take it that that is a wait and see?

Mr Dominic Raab: We’re always desperate to get more evidence and then respond to it as it firmed up, and as we had a clearer idea of what the implications were, and indeed the implications of the various policy options.

Mr Dayle: You state at paragraph 212 of your witness statement, which I referred to earlier, that:

“What was clear was that schooling would be impacted by lockdown and particularly significant effects on poorer children and those from ethnic minorities.”

Why was it clear to you that there would be a significant impact on poorer children and those from ethnic minority backgrounds?

Mr Dominic Raab: You’re citing from 211?

Mr Dayle: 212.

Mr Dominic Raab: 212. (Pause). Yeah, but, look, I think in all of this – and I at various points questioned, in this kind of scenario, a box tick exercise I think is very difficult to decipher what I think ought to be the overriding issue, which is vulnerability. I felt, and I think I still feel – though, again, always happy to reassess the evidence that we have today – that the two bits of our, sections of our, cohorts of our society most dramatically affected by lockdown were children if we locked down schools, and the impact on the elderly from the measures that we were taking, whether it was to lock down or not to lock down, and if we did lock down then you’ve got safeguarding and the perennial issues around that.

In relation to children, the more disproportionate impact will be on children from deprived backgrounds, and it’s just, I think, a fact, a sad fact, that that will include disproportionate number of black and ethnic minority children. And so that’s the – that’s not based on some standalone evidence in relation to black or ethnic minority children, it’s in relation to children, middle class or well off children, I think it’s fair to say, and with families that can deal with the home schooling or the schooling by Zoom or by Teams, I think would be – would lose out less, although everyone lost out, than those from more deprived backgrounds where dealing with those kind of remote learning challenges would be less easy.

That’s the reflection I have.

Mr Dayle: This Inquiry has heard a fair amount of expert evidence, including from Sir Patrick Vallance, that disparities in health outcomes from the pandemic were “entirely foreseeable”. This would tend to support your observations about the impact of lockdown on poorer children and those from ethnic minority backgrounds. How, then, do you reconcile this understanding with what you say earlier in the same paragraph, that is paragraph 212, where you say that you did not have much learning on the variable impact of Covid on those from ethnic minority backgrounds?

Mr Dominic Raab: At the time we didn’t. So, Patrick may say we do now, of course that’s the point of this Inquiry, and I think learning lessons and as the evidence evolves, because of course a huge evidence base is coming out of the pandemic, but at the material time at which these decisions were making, I think that’s correct.

Mr Dayle: Very well. Those are my questions. Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Dayle.

Ms Davies. Again I understand you’re going to cover one point that you thought Counsel to the Inquiry was going to cover.

Ms Davies: My Lady, you’ve given permission for that, so thank you very much and I will do it within the time allocated.

Questions From Ms Davies KC

Ms Davies: Mr Raab, I’m asking questions on – can you see and hear me?

Mr Dominic Raab: I can.

Ms Davies KC: Yes. I’m asking questions on behalf of Southall Black Sisters and –

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes.

Ms Davies KC: – Solace Women’s Aid, who you will know are part of the violence against women and girls sector and concerned with domestic abuse.

So I have three topics, as my Lady has kindly said. The first is about equality impact assessments. You say at paragraph 210 that those were carried out by the civil service, but you thought they were a fairly blunt tool. You’re not a huge fan?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah, that’s probably a reasonable – I mean, I think it’s an important objective, of course, to see the disproportionate impact on members of our society, or specific communities, of measures we’re taking or indeed the pandemic as a whole. Whether the EIAs discharge that effectively I think is a moot point.

Ms Davies KC: So a useful tool but maybe not carried out effectively?

Mr Dominic Raab: Well, whether it’s the –

Ms Davies KC: A useful function, I should have said.

Mr Dominic Raab: I think a useful aim. Whether the EIA is the right tool, as currently focused, I don’t know.

Ms Davies KC: Just to take one example – and you may say, well, you have no recollection of this – but in your witness statement you’re talking about one meeting that you chaired, which was a deep dive on 29 April, it’s paragraph 188, and it’s looking forward to the end of lockdown and possible measures to be introduced at the border to reduce risk of imported cases coming in. Four recommendations emerge, and the fourth one is a requirement for arrivals to self-isolate for 14 days, either at home or in hotels.

Can you remember whether that deep dive was accompanied by an equality impact assessment, and whether there was any consideration of the possibility of domestic abuse emerging if couples are self-isolating for 14 days?

Mr Dominic Raab: I can’t, in relation to that particular deep dive. We were certainly – I certainly remember reflected on the fact that the lockdowns had a varying effect on, if I can put it this way, family harmony.

You had quite a few people, if I could say this, typically middle class families – and I heard a lot of this in my own constituency – for whom lockdown was an epiphany moment because they spent more time as a family. Now, there were all sorts of challenges and hardships, of course, but there was something rather positive about that.

I think there were also, we were very conscious, would be other communities and households in other parts of the country where the experience was that actually the combustible nature of what was going on in the home, whether it was because of mental health challenges or whether it was because of domestic tensions and domestic abuse, where that was very different.

Quite whether an EIA would have picked that up and what would it have told us that we could have done about it, I think is another question.

But I don’t remember, and forgive me, on that specific deep dive of 29 April quite what the EIA said, or indeed if it was conducted.

Ms Davies KC: Thank you. And of course, I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply this, but domestic abuse happens in middle class families as well as non-middle class families, of course.

Mr Dominic Raab: Oh, sure.

Ms Davies KC: Of course.

Mr Dominic Raab: And just look – and in fact in Surrey we’ve got very, very high levels of domestic abuse. So I don’t think it follows class or even wealth. My reflection is just that I think intuitively and impressionistically, but I suspect the data backs it up, there are two diverse experiences of lockdown, both of which were quite salient. Some families where there was a very positive dynamic, for whatever reason, people took a moment to think, “Well, actually, I want to spend more time with the family and maybe I was working too hard”.

We can see this, by the way, in –

Ms Davies KC: If you don’t mind, I’ve got very limited time.

Mr Dominic Raab: Well, you did put it to me that I was somehow –

Lady Hallett: It’s because of me, Mr Raab, I’m afraid I’ve imposed strict time limits.

Mr Dominic Raab: Okay. But –

Ms Davies: We have the point that families have different experiences in lockdown.

Mr Dominic Raab: Very good.

Ms Davies KC: Thank you.

Moving on to my next topic, and that’s about non-shielding vulnerable groups, and you had quite some involvement in considering what was called non-shielding vulnerable groups, so they’re not clinically vulnerable.

You chaired a meeting on 24 April, three days before the Prime Minister returned to work, and that was a Covid MIG on the non-shielded vulnerable groups.

I don’t need to take – I can see you’re looking for papers – you to the papers.

Simon Case presented on non-shielding vulnerable groups, and one of those groups was those experiencing domestic abuse, and he said that that was amongst the highest risk of government failing to meet needs, and described that risk as acute.

So the MIG took that very seriously.

We know that MIGs were abolished and replaced with Covid-O and Covid-S. Are you able to say whether or not that workstream headed up by Simon Case on domestic abuse moved over to the Covid-O/Covid-S structure, or whether it was lost or disrupted in some way?

Mr Dominic Raab: No, forgive me, I’ve no idea, it wasn’t either a direct personal responsibility – and of course Simon Case was very professional, so I think I would have assumed that that would have been continued through.

Ms Davies KC: My third additional question is this, and again it’s about the period when you’re acting Prime Minister, and it is – forgive me, I just have to get this on my screen – 16 April and you are addressing the nation in very sombre terms, and your address to the nation is about the decision that had been made, I think earlier that day, that the lockdown would continue for another three weeks, in other words it wouldn’t end early, and you make it very clear what a significant decision that was.

You end your speech with “Please stay at home, save lives and protect the NHS”, the government slogan.

Some five days earlier, 11 April, the Home Office had launched its “You Are Not Alone” campaign, Dame Priti Patel had done the daily press briefing and she had made a point of encouraging domestic abuse victims to know that they could leave home under the regulations if they needed to escape risk of injury, risk of harm.

Your speech doesn’t contain that information that those who were suffering domestic abuse or think they’re going to suffer domestic abuse or any other sort of injury could leave home. Do you think that it should have included that message?

Mr Dominic Raab: Was this at the press conference?

Ms Davies KC: It was the, I think, address to the nation, the daily press conference, yes, but it was one of the very significant ones because you’re saying –

Mr Dominic Raab: Yes, I understand.

Ms Davies KC: – lockdown will continue for three weeks.

Mr Dominic Raab: Look, inevitably, you have a very limited period of time because actually those press conferences were also supposed to be about taking questions, not just talking to the public, so inevitably we couldn’t contain every caveat to the headline advice; it just wasn’t manageable. I thought the Home Secretary had really spelt it out very clearly, we felt we’d landed that message. Of course you would always want to reinforce it, but there was probably a whole range of things where if I’d have gone down and itemised every element of the advice, we would have been there for a disproportionate period of time, and that wouldn’t have served the purpose of the press conference and landing the messages because I think people would have drifted off, frankly, and that was our experience if those became too unwieldy. So it wasn’t – I think we did land that message and I think we continued it in our comms more generally, and it certainly – because it wasn’t in every press conference or indeed that particular one didn’t – I don’t think it’s fair to read into that a deprioritisation or it being a lower level of importance.

Ms Davies KC: In hindsight, do you think that might have been an immensely welcome message for someone sitting at home watching you who was experiencing domestic abuse, or thought that she might soon, and was hearing that there would be another three weeks of lockdown?

Mr Dominic Raab: Look, I think with all of those groups that suffered disproportionately you can always look back and think, “Well, I wish I’d have done – said a bit more”, but in the end we only had a limited space within which to craft our message and deliver it, and that was true at a whole range of points. You know, you inevitably have to editorialise your message. But certainly we were very mindful throughout that there was this, if you like, simmering issue of domestic abuse and that lockdown was clearly making it worse, and we wanted to try and make sure that the lines of communication practically were there for anyone that needed that critical help.

Ms Davies: Thank you very much.

My Lady, thank you very much.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Ms Davies.

If you look straight ahead, Mr Raab, last furlong, Ms Mitchell.

Questions From Ms Mitchell KC

Ms Mitchell: Mr Raab, I appear as instructed by Aamer Anwar & Company on behalf of the Scottish Covid Bereaved.

I would like to take you back to the paragraph that my learned friend from Wales has already taken you to, that being paragraph 228 of your statement, and that’s coming up on screen for you now.

My learned friend covered, at least from Wales’ perspective, the issue of your irritation, and I have you noted as explaining in your response that there were perfectly good arguments sometimes why they – presumably the devolved administrations – might go a bit slower or a bit quicker, or why they wanted something that they hadn’t yet had. But you also say “sometimes it just felt like for the sake of doing something out of kilter with the UK Government, that there was a political gain in doing so”. Then you go on to say that you thought the differences were relatively minor in any event.

Now, I would like to ask you about that, and particularly focusing on the issue of your irritation. You have described yourself as a recovering lawyer, and you’ll know the benefit of basing your views on concrete evidence. So my question to you is this: why are you irritated on the basis that sometimes you just felt like it was political when you don’t actually have evidence to support that, but you do, by your own words, have evidence to support the idea that perfectly good arguments have been made as to why things could go faster or slower in Scotland or Wales?

Mr Dominic Raab: So, look, if I’d have had advance notice, I would have pored over the documents and come with a good example for Wales and a good example for Scotland. Forgive me, but we’re talking about matters that were a long time ago, and also I’m not trying to needle either Plaid Cymru or the SNP, but the truth is what I’m – the answer to your question is there was often a combination of reasons, some were more compelling or persuasive on the facts than others.

Ms Mitchell KC: Indeed, but you weren’t present at, for example, meetings with Scottish CMO when decisions were being taken in Scotland. So my question is: why are you ascribing the idea that it was political, instead of the idea that it might simply be, as you’ve said, a reasonable decision to take? Why –

Mr Dominic Raab: Because I was in a whole range of meetings with First Ministers or other ministers from the devolved administrations, whether it was Welsh or Scottish, and I also could see the ground or the reasons, whether it was on the papers or as explained by them, for the decisions and that was the view I took.

Ms Mitchell KC: I’d like to move on to paragraph 229, if we can have that up on the screen, please. You described what you’ve already mentioned about the benefits of matters being centralised and reserved to Westminster. What you’ve said, three lines down, is:

“However, any taking back of powers would be politically controversial, so there should be a very high threshold for doing so and I would need to be persuaded that there was a demonstrably significant gain in efficacy. As a result of my experience during Covid, I was not so persuaded.”

So I would like to ask you two questions on that, interrelated, the first being: why were you not so persuaded? And the second being: what do you consider the threshold for Westminster taking back powers from the devolved administrations to be?

So I wonder if I can ask for your comment on the first question, please.

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I’m making the case that on balance I don’t – for those that think we should become more centralised, I’m not persuaded of the case. I think if you did want to do that and you wanted to make that case and you wanted to pass it with the consent of the devolved administrations, or one or other of them, I think the bar would have to be quite high, given (a) the legislative requirements for doing so, and (b) frankly just political common sense.

My overriding experience is that actually team UK work very well together and because of the United Kingdom-wide government working with the devolved administrations on those three critical areas, test and trace, PPE procurement and vaccine roll-out, actually we worked very effectively together and it was a good example of the UK delivering for the people of Scotland or indeed the people of Wales.

Ms Mitchell KC: Mr Raab, we’ve heard therefore that you weren’t persuaded that, as a result of your experience during Covid, that the threshold had been reached for, as you’ve described it, taking back – any taking back of powers. The second part of my question, and I shall remind you of it, is: what do you consider the threshold for Westminster taking back powers to be?

Mr Dominic Raab: High.

Ms Mitchell KC: Is that your only –

Mr Dominic Raab: Given that I’m not in favour of it, I’m just making the point that for those that are making the case, I think the basis would be pretty high, whether it was because the legislative or the political common sense would be – that, frankly, I think that most people with a political antennae would know, you’d want to have the Scottish people with you, you’d want to be able to make the overwhelming case that they would be better. I’m not – you know, I’m not sure, for such a controversial step, that that case has been made and, as I said, quite how I’d define high … I haven’t dwelt on this at any great length, but I think the case for unpicking the current devolved settlement – I think you’ve got to be very careful what you wish for, and I think the case for re-centralising power has not been made.

Ms Mitchell KC: I wonder if we can move on to page 230 of your statement. I don’t need to that to be brought up online, but you said there that:

“There were benefits to the devolved approach as it meant Scotland and Wales were required to face up to the same difficult decisions those of us in Westminster had to and work with Westminster on them.”

Other than political considerations, do you consider there to be any benefits to the devolved approach in the pandemic?

Mr Dominic Raab: Yeah, I think the critical one is accountability. So to the – I mean, in an emergency, and you look at, for example, other countries around the world, and people would comment that for example test and trace or whatever else was done more effectively in some of the East Asian countries, but however much more centralised – frankly more authoritarian approach often – I’m not for a second suggesting – indeed I think you have to take that into account as to why, in a western liberal democracy and a European one, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

I think that there are obviously areas where, if you can devolve things locally, that’s valued, and that’s in normal times. In a crisis it’s slightly different because you want more decisive action, but actually I think what I’m saying is overall, net of all of those considerations, I think it worked out quite well. And one of the positives – if, for example, there is any naked politicking, there’s going to have to be accountability for it, and that’s the natural course of a devolved settlement. There will be local accountability for local decision-making.

Ms Mitchell KC: So you’ve identified accountability, but what I’m asking is: was there any actual benefit in respect of what happened during the pandemic?

Mr Dominic Raab: I’m not averse to that thesis, that argument. I’d need to reflect on it, I haven’t thought about whether or how the devolved settlements actually helped the Scottish or Welsh administrations deal more effectively than it all being centralised. I would – but I can see how that could be the case, particularly, for example, where you’re dealing with local authorities or potentially care homes. Although, again, it depends whether you’re talking about judging it by results or judging it by theoretical powers. But, you know, I’m not in the business of criticising the DAs, I’m in the business of working with them as effectively as possible.

Ms Mitchell: My Lady, those are my questions.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Ms Mitchell.

I should just say, Mr Raab, before I have Mr Drakeford on the phone, that I think you twice referred to Plaid Cymru as being the government in Wales. It’s a Labour government, I think.

The Witness: Of course, of course.

Lady Hallett: I just didn’t want anyone getting upset that we didn’t understand.

Is that it?

Mr O’Connor: My Lady, I have nothing further.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Mr Raab. I’m sorry we’ve kept you here for so long –

The Witness: That’s fine.

Lady Hallett: – but we have now completed your evidence, and I’m very grateful for your help.

The Witness: Very good, thank you.

(The witness withdrew)

Lady Hallett: And it’s 10 o’clock tomorrow, please.

(4.57 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10 am on Thursday, 30 November 2023)