Ministers using ‘loophole lawyers’ to obstruct Covid inquiry, says Labour | PMQs

Angela Rayner has accused the Conservatives of spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on “loophole lawyers” in an attempt to obstruct the Covid inquiry.

The deputy Labour leader stepped in for Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions while Oliver Dowden covered for Rishi Sunak, who is in Washington for talks with the US president, Joe Biden.

Mocking Dowden’s attempts to present himself as a “man of the people” because of his working-class background, Rayner questioned why the government was frustrating the Covid inquiry set up to “get to the truth”. Boris Johnson is asking for “another £1m for his lawyers”, she said.

Johnson has been at the centre of a row as ministers launched a high court attempt to challenge the inquiry’s demand for his unredacted WhatsApp messages and contemporaneous notebooks.

Rayner launched the deputy PMQs session with a question on whether the Conservatives were still planning on reforming judicial reviews, as set out in the last Tory manifesto.

“He [Dowden] pretends that it’s complicated but it’s simple,” Rayner said. “They set up the inquiry to get to the truth, then blocked that inquiry from getting the information that it asked for and now they’re taking it to court.

“I know he considers himself a man of the people, so using his vast knowledge of working-class Britain, does he think working people will thank him for spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of their money on loophole lawyers, just so the government can obstruct the Covid inquiry?”

Dowden said the government would provide the inquiry with all Covid-related documents, while protecting material that the Tories considered “unambiguously irrelevant”.

He claimed that the inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, was calling for “years’ worth of documents and messages between named individuals to be in scope and that could cover anything from civil servants’ medical conditions to intimate details about their families”.

It comes after the health secretary, Steve Barclay, said the government trusted Lady Hallet, who is a product of the UK’s “world-leading” judiciary, despite launching a legal challenge against her requests.

Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme whether he and the prime minister trusted the inquiry chair, Barclay said: “Yes, I do.”

Pressing again on the government’s mismanagement of taxpayers’ money, Rayner said Britain “cannot afford any more of the Conservatives”, citing a public accounts committee (PAC) report that said £21bn had been lost to fraud by the government.

Dowden quipped that Labour was planning a “£28bn spending spree that would add to £1,000 to everyone’s mortgages”, but Rayner responded using the PAC’s remarks that the “government cannot ensure money is spent properly”.

The deputy prime minister was asked twice about the government’s plans to launch a missing children’s register. Responding to Rayner who asked why the Tories have abandoned plans to create the register, Dowden said: “This is still under review.”

When Tory MP Flick Drummond asked if the government still supported the idea of a missing children’s register, Dowden said: “We do want to ensure that all children are safe and have access to an excellent education and of course, local authorities must seek to identify children missing in their area and ensure that they are safe.”