Pressure on ministers to reveal data on economic impact of Covid-19

Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson

Ministers could be forced to publish secret data laying bare the impact of coronavirus on the economy after a Parliamentary committee threatened to use its powers to demand full disclosure.

Darren Jones MP, the chairman of the Commons business committee, told The Telegraph he was seeking advice from Parliamentary officials as to whether he could force the Government to release the data.

Under the powers granted to select committees, their members have the power to summon documents as well as people to appear before them.

“As a committee we are considering the issue,” Mr Jones said. “It’s important for Parliament to have access to timely economic data if the Government has it at its disposal.”

Allies of Sir Keir Starmer also warned that the Labour leader was looking at the possibility of using a Parliamentary mechanism known as a humble address to secure access to the data.

As shadow Brexit secretary, Sir Keir successfully used the process in 2018 to force the then attorney general, Geoffrey Cox QC, to publish his legal advice on Theresa May’s Brexit deal.

They were backed by David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, who told this newspaper that all non-sensitive data relating to the economy should be in the "public domain".

“What we’ve seen in the last six to nine months is the Government acting almost independently of Parliament,” he added. “It hasn’t been the best advert for accountability.”

It came just hours after it emerged that an internal dataset, which provides a comprehensive analysis of the hit suffered by dozens of sectors of the economy, had been drawn up by the Department for Business.

Government sources confirmed the existence of the dossier, which gives a red, amber and green rating to different sectors, after a minister told The Times that a “lot of the detail” had not been disclosed in an official assessment published on Monday.

The document is updated by officials in the departments for business; transport; the environment; culture, media and sport, and shows that aviation, the car industry, retail, hospitality, sports and the arts were among the worst impacted sectors.

However, Downing Street refused to say whether a second data set existed, after Whitehall insiders suggested that it was separate to a second project commissioned by the Government in June.

According to a Department for Business contract notice, a £120,000 deal was signed with the data firm Faculty to develop tools to “inform policy decisions and prioritise funding to vulnerable businesses, sectors or geographies, and monitor business closures and impacts in near real-time.”

Urging the Government to publish all the relevant data, a Labour source said: “The Government should release this because we need transparency and accountability.

“We need to know where the real damage is being done to the economy. If we get a chance to hold that vote [on a humble address] then we would do and would hope Conservative MPs would vote with us.”