'Unfair' and 'incorrect' - Scotland's former health secretary rejects inquiry report criticisms

Ms Freeman also rejected the suggestion there was “antipathy” from Nicola Sturgeon towards Boris Johnson and said she had to put up with “patronising, disrespectful, dismissive behaviour” from Downing Street.

Ms Freeman, who stood down from frontline politics in 2021, was talking to LBC about the second report published by Baroness Hallett yesterday.

But while she said the report appeared “pretty fair” in its “overall assessment” that the UK government and the devolved administrations were too slow to react, she said there was a “failure to understand the devolution settlement.”

“The criticism about late lockdown doesn't recognise that while we might have wanted to impose the first lockdown earlier, that is not possible for three of the four nations, since the fourth nation, England, controls the purse strings on that,” she said.

“You can't lockdown without some kind of system to try and maintain a base level of economic functioning, i.e. the furlough scheme. So, whatever the devolved nations wanted to do, that rested solely at the hands of the UK government. So I think that's a little unfair.

“And I also think it is unfair to imply that all four nations needed to take the politics out of all of this. We certainly did. I have lost count of the number of times I had to bite my lip and put up with patronising, disrespectful, dismissive behaviour from particularly No 10.

“Actually, in the report itself it is pretty clear that if anyone was trying to make political capital out of this, it was, in fact, primarily Boris Johnson. So I think there are bits of it that are unfair.

“But I think the testing, the core testing capacity and how poor that was across all four nations is entirely fair criticism, and I hope that the current government in Scotland is working to ensure that our core capacity to process tests is greater than what I inherited in 2018 when I became health secretary.”

On relations between Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon - which the report says had an influence on the working between the two governments - Ms Freeman rejected there was “antipathy” from Nicola Sturgeon.

“I did not see in any of the meetings that Mr Johnson cared to attend, or convene, antipathy from my First Minister towards him. The COBRA meetings, as I think is acknowledged in the report, were largely pointless.

“I think Mark Drakeford points out that we were presented with decisions already made. So the notion of this being a partnership between the four nations was not one that Mr Johnson acceded to. He did not see First Ministers as having the same role in all of this, as he did, despite the fact that there is a devolution settlement, and in Scotland, the NHS is the responsibility of the Scottish government.”

She added: “I think the antipathy came from No 10. There were many occasions when we were told about things after they were decided … for example, the Eat Out to Help out scheme, appeared out of a clear blue sky. We knew nothing about it, and were not happy. It completely undercut the public health message. But there was no consultation. There was no information. That was my experience.

“Now we might privately have fumed a little about it, but we made a huge effort to not have that intervene in our dealings and where there were difficulties. We worked very hard to find our way through.”

Ms Freeman also rejected the report’s findings that Nicola Sturgeon used the Scottish Cabinet as a ratifying body for her decisions - saying that she and her colleagues discussed everything at Cabinet meetings.

She says the “gold command meetings” name came from the civil service and were in fact Sunday night discussions about data. “It was about what we needed to do on the Monday. All of which was then taken to Cabinet, quite rightly, for Cabinet discussion and decision making. So I don't believe for one minute that this was some kind of elite group making all the decisions, and everyone else was shut out.”

Asked why the Inquiry had come to the opposite conclusion of how the Scottish Government operated, she says: “I don't know, maybe they are viewing how a devolved government operates through the lens of how a UK government operates. It is not the same.

"I don't know on what basis Baroness Hallett took that view, but I think it is incorrect.”

However, on the report’s criticisms of the government talking publicly about a zero Covid strategy to completely eliminate the virus - which it says was always going to fail, Ms Freeman agrees.

“It was not something that we could have achieved, and we should have been clearer about that, because we are not separated from the other nations. So the idea that it would be possible to eliminate the virus in Scotland was not one that was sustainable.”

Asked if she thinks her government got anything wrong - she said: “Anyone who's ever listened to anything I've ever said, since I stood down, will know fine well, that I accept, for example, our capacity to process tests at the outset was far too low.

“There's a huge amount of credit due to the officials and advisors working in health, and to our colleagues in the NHS, for how quickly these were scaled up, but we should have been in a better place to start with. And that held us back.

“I'm also clear on the decisions that were made that were never binary decisions between a good thing to do and a bad thing to do, but were always decisions. For example, in pausing elective work, and screening, particularly cancer screening, was an exceptionally difficult decision to make knowing that harm would be caused, but on the information available at the time, greater harm would be caused by not doing that.

“I've never claimed that we did everything right by any means. What I've always said is that I made the best decisions I believed were possible with the information I had at the time.”