UK government ‘rotten to its core’, Labor deputy leader says

UK Labor party is calling for a “full-scale” investigation into cabinet ministers’ use of private emails after the leaked information from a meeting at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) showed that Matt Hancock had been using an unofficial account since the onset of the pandemic.

Angela Rayner, Labor’s deputy leader, called for a wider probe into the issue on Thursday and said, “The buck doesn’t stop with Hancock and this matter is not closed. This government is rotten to its core.”

“We need to know how wide this goes and how much government business is being conducted in secret”, she added.

Following Hancock’s dramatic resignation over the weekend, and The Sunday Times claims about former Health Secretary’s repeated use of private email account for government dealings, the Labor Party warned that vital information could have been concealed due to the use of a private Gmail account.

Meanwhile, David Williams, Second Permanent Secretary of the DHSC, claimed that “the SOS [secretary of state] does not have a DHSC inbox,” adding that health minister Lord Bethell “routinely uses his private inbox,” but that official accounts had been provided afterward.

Rayner criticized the governments’ function and said, “This shady practice has the potential to conceal vital information of public waste of taxpayers’ money that has been given to friends of Conservative ministers.”

In a letter to the Head of the Home Civil Service Simon Case, Rayner complained about the use of private emails and reiterated that it would hinder scrutiny of ministerial decisions, citing both the impact on freedom of information requests and any future public investigations.

She also wrote that using private email accounts will lead to the leak of “sensitive information,” or the “blackmail of ministers by hostile actors.”

The MP asked Case to clarify whether the use of private emails could potentially breach the Freedom of Information Act, the Official Secrets Act, the Public Records Act, or the Data Protection Act.

The deputy leader also called on the government to reveal whether any other ministers had been using private emails for negotiating government contracts during the pandemic, since March 2020.

According to the Cabinet Office guidelines, if personal accounts are used for government business, either the sender or receiver must “take steps to ensure the relevant information is accessible (e.g. by copying it to a government email address)” for the purpose of saving records.