Former health secretary Matt Hancock acted unlawfully when he appointed former Talk Talk chief executive Dido Harding as chair of the National Institute for Health Protection and retail executive Mike Coupe as director of testing, the High Court has held
The government was found to have breached the public sector equality duty under s 149 of the Equality Act 2010 in the process leading up to the appointments, in R (on the application of Good Law Project and another) v The Prime Minister and another [2022] EWHC 298 (Admin).
The appointments were ‘closed appointments’, made without open competition and recruitment. The claimants contended the recruitment processes were discriminatory, breached the public sector equality duty and gave rise to apparent bias as well as indirect discrimination on grounds of race and/or disability.
Delivering their judgment, Singh LJ and Swift J said: ‘What the public sector equality duty requires is not necessarily a particular outcome, for example an open recruitment policy.
‘Nevertheless, there must be some evidence of what precisely the decision-maker did in the circumstances of these cases to discharge the obligation when deciding the method by which each relevant appointment was to be made … We have considered with care the evidence filed on behalf of the defendants and cannot find any such evidence.’
Rook Irwin Sweeney, which acted for the claimants, said in a statement: ‘Significantly, the judgment confirms that a public body cannot lawfully make public appointments without considering what steps can be taken in that process to avoid the risk of discrimination, and to advance equality of opportunity―even where normal appointment processes don’t apply, and even in a public health emergency.’
According to the Runnymede Trust, Lord Justice Singh and Mr Justice Swift’s judgment also makes clear the Prime Minister acted unlawfully by appointing Baroness Harding as chair of Test and Trace.
The Trust’s Dr Halima Begum and Sir Clive Jones said: ‘It should not be acceptable to drop our standards during complex health emergencies when countless lives are at stake, in particular the lives of some of our country’s most vulnerable citizens. Handing out vital public sector contracts to friends, relatives and associates―whether employment contracts or commercial―is simply not good enough.’
