Image source, HoC

Labour's Graham Stringer asks why Matt Hancock is still the health secretary and why the PM didn't take Cummings' advice to fire him?

Cummings says Boris Johnson came close to "removing him" in April 2020 but held back.

He says he can't speculate as to why he held on to him because "there was certainly no good reason" to do so.

Why didn't you resign yourself in protest asks Mr Stringer?

Cummings says he thought about it but things seemed to bounce back so he did not do it.

He says he went to see the PM at the end of July and told him he would leave Downing Street at the latest by Friday 18th December because "this whole system is chaos, this building is chaos".

He says he told the PM he wasn't prepared to work with Matt Hancock any more but the PM admitted he was more frightened of Cummings having the power to make changes than taking the action he wanted.

Image source, HoC

Labour's Dawn Butler says that Amnesty International has accused the government of sharing Covid medical records with Amazon, Google and others for Covid health data.

Dominic Cummings says "there does need to be transparency" but he says he'd be "gobsmacked" if that data is not anonymous.

"I would bet a lot of money that's not the case, that data is anonymised."

Dawn Butler says that there is a disclaimer that this data shared with the companies may not be anonymous.

Cummings says these companies "will not have personalised data".

Butler asks what role Amazon has played in this.

Cummings says Amazon offered help in March for distribution of tests, but he can't remember the details.

Image source, HoC

Dominic Cummings says he did not have a day off since entering Downing Street on 24 July 2019, although he says Christmas 2019 was a partial day off.

Labour's Dawn Butler asks about the involvement of the firm Faculty AI, which worked on NHS projects.

Cummings says the company was already working with the NHS and was asked by Sir Simon Stevens to help with the Covid response.

Cummings says the company has suffered from working with the government as part of conspiracy theories over the failure of an NHS app which got scrapped, which "they had absolutely nothing to do with".

Image source, HoC

Image source, HoC

Dominic Cummings says the government "didn't explain the danger properly and we didn't provide an incentive properly".

He says people didn't understand the dangers of airborne transmission as the government had not explained it and "that was a big problem".

He goes on to say that they did not provide the incentive for people to isolate.

"If we had just cut and pasted what they were doing in Singapore or Taiwan etc then things would have been better," he says.

Where was the data on Covid?published at 12:42 British Summer Time 26 May 2021

12:42 BST 26 May 2021

Nick Triggle
Health Correspondent

Dominic Cummings has said repeatedly this morning that there was a lack of data early on in the pandemic, that the government could rely on to assess the Covid threat.

The first confirmed Covid case was right at the end of January. In the following weeks, there was a trickle of cases linked to the virus being brought in from travellers from Asia and continental Europe.

But data published last summer, external found the virus was brought in on at least 1,300 separate occasions by late March.

It was here and spreading before anyone knew.

Chief medical adviser Prof Chris Whitty has previously said the information that was available to government was “very limited” even in early March.

It meant the modelling that was being done underestimated just how quickly cases were rising.

The scientists advising government say it was not until a paper was presented by Imperial College London to government on 16 March that the true scale of what was coming was spelt out clearly for the first time.

Cummings says he was pushing for a system which would have allowed the government to look at positive test cases and consider bank data, phone data, to triangulate where people were and what they were doing.

He says the EU stopped this kind of data retention and examination by government, because of GDPR rules.

Considering how test and trace data was to be implemented "should have been looked at in January," Cummings tells MPs.

Jeremy Hunt asks if Cummings takes responsibility for this delay.

"I blame myself for many, many, many things in this whole crisis," Cummings replies, "I said repeatedly from February/March, if we don't fire the Secretary of State [Matt Hancock]... we are going to kill people and it is going to be a catastrophe."

The government "kind of collapsed when the prime minister got ill himself," Cummings tells MPs.

He says pledging to do 100,000 tests a day by the end of April "was an incredibly stupid thing to do" because he says the government had started ramping down testing capacity again.

He says "Hancock was interfering" with things in government to make sure he hit the target "when the PM was on his death bed".

Cummings says he and Sir Patrick Vallance had to start calling around government officials and saying "do not do what Hancock says," he says Hancock was instructing officials to hold tests back so he could hit his 100,000 target by the end of April.

Image source, HiC

We are back after the break with chair of the Health and Social Care Committee Jeremy Hunt asking about the test and trace programme.

He asks why there was such a long delay on restarting community testing, which was stopped on 12 March and resumed in May.

Cummings says that if you are going for the single peak strategy you do not take testing as an urgent priority.

"The view was 'well 60% or 70% of the country are going to get it'," he says. "Why would you bother testing all those people?"

He says no one challenged that idea until there was a shift to plan B.

Cummings says that even in late March Public Health England said there was "no way" people in the country would do test, track and trace like they do in east Asia.

Image source, HoC

Image source, HoC

Over at PMQs, SNP Westminster leader, Ian Blackford also pushes the PM on Dominic Cummings' allegations.

He says there is no doubt, as the former aide claims, that the PM's decisions cost thousands of lives.

Mr Johnson says he takes full responsibility for everything and is "truly sorry" for the suffering people endured.

He says he acted throughout with the intention to save lives and protect the NHS

Blackford says the evidence is extraordinary but not surprising, and it paints a picture of a negligent PM who did not take the virus seriously enough.

We had "a circus act when we needed serious action" he says.

Johnson says one of the reasons an independent inquiry will be held is that "people deserve daylight to be shone on all the issues".

Image source, HoC

Image source, HoC

The MPs are back in the committee room and Dominic Cummings has resumed his testimony.

Stay with us for the rest of the session in full.

Image source, HoC

The Labour leader Keir Starmer uses all his questions at PMQs to pick over Dominic Cummings' evidence this morning.

He begins by asking if the PM agrees with Cummings' view that the government failed in its handling of the pandemic?

None of these decisions have been easy says the PM and it was "appallingly difficult" to deal with a pandemic on this scale.

Mr Johnson says the public inquiry on Covid will get to the bottom of the issues including when lockdowns were introduced.

Starmer says the PM's former adviser has told the world how bad Johnson was at making decisions.

He asks if the cabinet secretary advised the PM that he lost faith in the health secretary's honesty after Cummings said Matt Hancock had lied on at least "15 to 20" times about government preparedness.

Johnson says the answer is no, that did not happen.

The PM says he took the best decisions in the interests of the country and the Labour leader needs to stop playing "political games"

Image source, HoC

Dominic Cummings told MPs about one day of Covid planning, the US wanting to bomb Iraq and the PM's girlfriend "going completely crackers".

The PM's former adviser described March 12 last year when part of No 10 was talking of bombing Iraq, another part arguing about whether to put the UK into quarantine, and Carrie Symonds "going crackers about something completely trivial" over a press story about her dog.

He said: “It sounds so surreal it couldn't possibly be true".

Committee chair Greg Clark has called a pause for a short break.

They are expected back in 15 minutes.

Greg Clark puts it to Dominic Cummings that he is a whistleblower and asks if he "forgot to blow the whistle?"

Mr Cummings says he would not describe himself as such but says it is "true I hit the panic button and said we have to ditch the official plan".

He says while those that backed the official plan will say it was a disaster, but he feels it was a disaster that he did so too late.

"The fundamental reason was I was really frightened of acting," he says, adding that if he hit the panic button and got it wrong "I was going to kill hundreds of thousands of people".

Chair Greg Clark talks about the modelling and the idea of flattening the curve of the pandemic, saying that either there was a pattern of groupthink among advisers which Dominic Cummings was part of, or he did not feel senior enough to speak up.

Cummings says the problem was being trapped by the idea that there was either an option of a single peak trying to reach herd immunity, or try to act now which probably won't work but would lead to a second peak in the winter.

"The fundamental groupthink problem was being trapped by the idea that there was herd immunity by September or herd immunity by January whereas in fact the right way of looking at it was you could have both," he says.

Image source, UK Parliament

Normally at this time on a Wednesday we’d be warming up for the start of PMQs at 12:00.

It’s about to get underway as usual but we’re are going to stick with the committee hearing.

Will MPs ask the prime minister about any of the claims that Dominic Cummings has made this morning?

Of course, if anything jaw dropping is said in the Commons chamber, we’ll let you know.

And we’ll bring you a summary of what’s been said at PMQs in a short while.

Dominic Cummings is asked what he was doing if, as has been reported, he thought there was a lack of a proper plan for Covid in February.

He says he was locked in "meeting after meeting with people" to try and devise a strategy, adding it was "clear that overall, there was not a coherent plan".

He says "in retrospect" the government should have been ordering people to self-isolate, to wear masks and shutting down borders in February.

Mr Cummings adds that Boris Johnson "got some very serious things wrong" - but adds he was "extremely badly led down by the whole system, including himself.

He says even the "most competent people in the world" would have "had a complete nightmare" if they had been dropped into the PM's position at the start of the crisis.

Image source, HoC

Conservative Katherine Fletcher says science is driven by "actualities and not speculation" and she asks what the data was between January and April/May last year.

Cummings says "the data system on Monday 16 March was the following, it was me, wheeling in" a whiteboard "and Simon Stevens reading out numbers from the ICUs" and Cummings would estimate the exponential growth of the virus.

"There was no testing data," he adds that a tech startup built "a whole new NHS dashboard system" for Covid data in about 4-6 weeks, which allowed models and prediction on what was going to happen to the NHS.

"We now know that Covid had spread further and faster in January and February than we knew at the time," he states.

He says, looking at data "didn't really happen properly until mid-April," he adds that the government realised later, once all ICU data had been added together, that the UK was further along the pandemic curve of cases than previously thought.

Image source, HoC

There have been some dramatic developments as Dominic Cummings continues to give evidence - here's the headlines:

• Dominic Cummings says the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, should have been fired for "lying" about preparedness to deal with the virus and whether people were getting the treatment they need
• He says Hancock tried to blame PPE shortages on Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, and Chancellor Rishi Sunak
• The prime minister was more concerned about the economic damage because he did not think the virus was "the big danger"
• Reports that Rishi Sunak put the brakes on a lockdown are "completely wrong"
• A political system that gives people a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson is "terribly wrong" and creates a situation of "lions led by donkeys"
• There was chaotic decision making inside No 10, like "an out of control movie"
• He says on Friday 13 March a senior official Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen Macnamara came to him and said, “I think we are absolutely f***ed. I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people”
• He says Covid planning meetings were derailed by dealings with Trump, and the PM's girlfriend wanting the No 10 press office to deal with media reports over the PM's dog
• Cummings says the PM regarded Covid as a "scare story" and wanted to be injected on TV
• He says ministers, officials and advisers "fell disastrously short" and claims of preparedness were "completely hollow"

Asked what he thought of official government emergency planning documents, including the national risk register, he says he thought they "fall very far short of what is actually needed".

He adds many of the documents are "Powerpoints" that "lack detail".

He says the country doesn't the country spends "anything like" enough money on planning for disasters, and adds that the process should be opened up to a wider range of experts.

He says that, ideally "you'd have had a kind of dictator" in charge of recruiting officials and experts.