61 Comments

This is genuinely fascinating to read Dominic. This stuff doesn’t get a lot of traction in the media, cos people don’t understand how Whitehall operates – there’s never really been an insider who has so openly laid out the system’s dysfunction in such detail. People know the government doesn’t work – but they don’t have the specific knowledge of how it doesn’t work.

Please keep writing about it!

A young(ish) person like me (28 now) who is not in government but has an interest in politics will find this to be a real education. And then these young people can start to carry these ideas forward and maybe affect a real change in how the system operates (eventually).

Expand full comment

Really?

The experience I had with Babcock during the scramble for Manufacturers to help out in Ventilator manufacturing was laughable.

My company has mas made Respirators for Accute Critical Care with full certification.

We could have been anybody applying the the Government's procurement process.

They sent me drawings and designs without fully veting our standards.

Total sham!

I'll reveal and discuss this more

Expand full comment
founding

Having assessed the technical part of one "small" procurement, I must agree with the above. It wasted days of my time, going through unnecessary details. The time of 5+ Civil Servants to get one consulting firm to do a simple job.

I would also point out that having teams that only do procurement incentivises them to build a further wasteful system as it secures their further employment and importance. Moving procurement to an ad hoc basis of the people needing the service would incentivise them to limit the workload.

-The bureaucracy needs to expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

Expand full comment

Says a LOT about Westminster/Whitehall that they think this makes you look bad! Also that this is the best no 10 have on you is tragic. Keep hammering

Expand full comment

Dominic, yes it was pretty clear at that time the data from the NHS was a mess.

The big question is what happened 23rd March onwards.

As I understand it SAGE and the government were expecting peak fatality date to be end of April early May

Why did no one question when it turned out to be the 8th April?

Just two weeks after the start of lockdown 1

Anyone using the data would have concluded that they missed peak infection date by over 3 weeks

Yet the NHS wasn't overwhelmed

Isn't the logic that London and the South East saw the full force of covid 19 fatalities in March and April the peak infection date had already passed and therefore the NHS was never at risk?

This needs very serious consideration.

Arguments that people were already taking precautions are not valid as people were still moving around pretty much as normal using public transport etc

I don't think it needs Sherlock Holmes to figure it out?

Expand full comment
founding

It says everything about the people who leaked this email that they thought it would damage you and undermine your fundamental point about the need for state reform!

The mentality such an act reveals underlines the need FOR major reform of how government works

To any sane individual, the q 'should we ensure this group of data scientists doing critical work benefitting key decision makers, media types, and publics across the world can continue to do their work?' only has one answer - yes.

Makes you wonder if the system attract people who think procedures are an end in themselves (even in the midst of a genuine world crisis), or does its incentives skew the values and mindsets of hitherto normal people? I suspect bit of both, but mainly latter

Expand full comment

Given that vast majority of MPs care more about their daily media coverage than solving long term problems, it seems a good plan to get media to focus on the way Whitehall is set up to completely fail during a crisis to hopefully get MPs to start talking about it. However, how can get media to do this when media itself thrives on soundbites and new stories every 5 minutes and not examining long standing complex problems? Eg Your 'fu****** useless' blogpost was front page news, this post has hardly been mentioned in MSM presumably as it doesn't have the same 'bombshell headline'.

Expand full comment

Another excellent insight, the more I read the more incompetent the situation sounds, I imagine it was infuriating in the midst of crisis! You went above and beyond and acted in completely the right manner! I will certainly share and message my MP as suggested. It is clear an urgent inquiry is needed now! Let’s make it happen and stop the re writing of history!

Expand full comment

DC - thanks, again, for lifting the lid on the festering pit of incompetence that was the UKGov Covid policy. It is truly breathtaking. The way that ministers and their media apparatchiks are squirming to evade even the slightest blame by pumping out BS non-stories like this one is truly pathetic. The decisions made in the early weeks of the pandemic have already led to the largest increase in excess mortality since the founding of the NHS and the consequences of their actions will last for years to come, vaccine or no vaccine. I can't imagine the horror and frustration you must have faced when trying to collate crucial data absolutely required to make life or death decisions only to find that it *didn't exist*. As someone who realised in March 2020 that we were being gaslighted by No 10, and started building my own stochastic models of our situation to try and be able to make decisions for myself and family, the lack of any reliable data source was mind-boggling. How much worse for those tasked with making decisions on public policy.

Incidentally, whoever made the "https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/" service was a fucking hero. I use that all the time. Props.

I would like to see a greater discussion on the outrageous degree of *actual corruption* during this time. Producers of ventilators pushed out of the way as contracts were handed out to folk who had never made a ventilator before, PPE contracts going to shady individuals based in Florida, the connections between contracts and Tory party donors etc. etc. etc. Heads should roll.

Finally, although not directly related to this particular post, let me again lament that many credible voices in the Indy SAGE team (and elsewhere) were not given a hearing by official SAGE, and the basic, tried and tested track, trace and supported isolation plans they produced were never given a hearing by the Govt. The policy of lockdown and release, with no follow up was really a very poor way to try and handle a novel virus outbreak.

Expand full comment

Dominic, the information you provide in that email of 25th March shows basic data management errors that any BI practitioner would immediately recognise: non-canonical data; inconsistent periodicity; poor data definitions; retrospective updates; lack of data integrity... etc. Given those circumstances, it is a wonder that any reliable COVID intelligence emerged.

Expand full comment

Glad to see you won at the Court of Appeal. That must be a relief.

I'm honestly a bit surprised that the case went against you in the High Court. Since the judge agreed that this was a Regulation 32 situation, in which no actual competition was necessary, it seems odd to say that, even so, the appearance of a competition was necessary!

I completely agree with you that current procurement rules are a menace and a mess, but I would have thought the whole point of Regulation 32 was to mitigate some of their worst excesses in an emergency - the Regulation equivalent of an ambulance being allowed to speed and ignore traffic lights (and disregard other Regulations like 67, which the Court of Appeal amusingly described as "the antithesis of urgency"). COVID was obviously a crisis, so it's a little surprising that this case ever got as far as it did.

Expand full comment

I've worked in the utilities sector for over 30yrs and this sector has very similar problems with procurement that you mention here (although I've worked in 'emergency situations' and managed to cut through the red tape). The rules place power in the hands of non-deliverers who are totally obsessed with procedure instead of outcomes - seemingly assuming that value for money trumps everything when people can't begin to define what value is. Over the last 20yrs the procedures have become even more byzantine. The whole protocol needs fundamental reform. I'd be happy to share some thoughts - whilst my experience is private sector (regulated monopoly) the principles apply equally to the public sector.

Expand full comment

This is what I like - a detailed breakdown of the events and failings. It's seems the media, other parties or anything/anyone from the establishment will actually never address the failings. They prefer to cover it up or forget it. The system needs a complete overhaul...the rewiring of parties I am looking forward to...take them down from the inside? How best to smash up an old dysfunctional system.

Expand full comment

On the OWID issue, there was no need for any delays. Even within the system you can award an accountable grant pretty instantly to a charity if you have delegated authority. A grade 7 should have that ability at that level. Half the issue with the civil service is no one knows how to work within the rules and what needs escalating.

Expand full comment

I've worked on large public sector procurements from the supplier side - they can cost millions to bid, and it ties up large teams of talented, expensive people for months. Only companies that can afford to lose (and potentially write off millions in bid costs) will bid, which definitely discriminates against the smaller innovative orgs. It's a crazy system, massively inefficient, creating enormous paper trails to justify the decision making process. It is supposed to deliver value for money. Interesting insights in this article, good to read as a counter to the media narrative.

Expand full comment

Off-topic to the points about procurement (so delete if you like), but just on this: "Ps. Totally unconnected to the above but very relevant to covid generally. This paper has just been posted by a serious researcher. Very early genomic sequences of covid were *deleted from the NIH archive*."

I read the Biorxiv piece, and came away feeling that it actually *strengthens* the zoonosis hypothesis. Multiple genome sequences from people who were infected showing quite a lot of variation in the virus before *subsequently* it reaches a more consistent, and consistently infectious, form. That's *not* what you'd expect to see from a leak of a single virus. It's more like a zoonosis with multiple nearly-working variants that sputter out until one hits the jackpot. After all, it's not even certain that the first cases were really in Wuhan; it may be one of those "airplanes that survive anti-aircraft fire" things: you identify and sequence the virus in a city that has a viral genome sequencing lab. (HIV was first identified in Los Angeles. That's not its origin.)

The deletion of the data, which seems to have been reposted later in the same year as its deletion, in other papers, looks like China being authoritarian and paranoid; so no change there. Virologists I follow don't think the paper, which is scrupulously fair, moves the needle in either direction on lab leak v zoonosis.

Expand full comment