Boris Johnson defends Eat Out to Help Out saying there is no 'substantial evidence' it led to a surge in Covid cases during pandemic

Boris Johnson today defended the Eat Out To Help Out scheme brought in by his government to help businesses during the Covid pandemic, saying there is no 'substantial evidence' it led to a surge in cases.

The former prime minister said the scheme had not been presented to him as a 'gamble' at the time, as he gave evidence to the official Covid Inquiry for a second day.

Mr Johnson also questioned evidence given previously by scientists Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance that the scheme that underwrote restaurant meals in the summer of 2020 had been introduced without their knowledge.

In a statement to the inquiry he made earlier this year he said they had been consulted. 

But today he admitted he was 'perplexed' by their claim not to have known about it. He did admit that Sir Chris referred to it as 'eat out to help out the virus' by September that year.

But he added: 'I defer to what your inquiry has discovered, but I can't see anything that conclusively shows that it made a big difference. At the time it wasn't presented to me as something that would.' 

He continued: 'At the time that the Eat Out to Help Out policy was being aired with me for the first time, it was not presented to me as an as an acceleration, simply something to make sense of the freedoms that we were already we were already giving.

'I must emphasise, it was not at the time presented to me as something that would add to the budget of risk.'

Mr Johnson told the Covid inquiry his statement says 'Chris (Whitty) and Patrick (Vallance) must have known, or did know, about Eat Out to Help Out'.

However, both leading scientists, plus others, have told the inquiry they were not told about the scheme before it was made public.

Mr Johnson said: 'I said that because it wasn't a very secret thing. It was, I thought, a pretty well-publicised scheme, and I'm fairly confident that it was discussed several times in meetings in which I believe they must have been present.'

He says he understands now that the pair do not feel they were properly consulted, but added: 'I don't quite understand how that could have happened'.

He added: 'I remember being surprised, later, I think it was in September, when Chris says 'this is eat out to help the virus'.

'And I thought, 'well, that's funny', because I didn't remember any previous controversy about it.'

Mr Johnson agreed there were bilateral meetings in June and July with the Treasury and the Chancellor during which the scheme was debated.

Hugo Keith KC asked him: 'There were no scientists present at any of those meetings were there?'

Mr Johnson replied: 'No, but it would have been normal for a project like that, a scheme like that, to have gone through the Covid-19 Taskforce and it seemed to me odd that the scientists hadn't been made aware of it.'

He later said: 'I don't understand how something as well publicised as that could have been smuggled past the the scientific advice, I don't see how that could have happened.'

Mr Johnson also acknowledged the complexities of rules during the pandemic, and suggested an approach more reliant on common sense and less on regulation in future.

He said he had 'a great deal of sympathy for the police, those who are charged with enforcing it, because it changed very often'.

The former prime minister on Wednesday admitted he should have 'twigged much sooner' about the threat posed by Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic, but he also sought to defend his administration from claims of a toxicity and dysfunction.

Relatives of Covid-19 victims gathered again outside the inquiry building at Dorland House in west London. Mr Johnson on Wednesday apologised for 'the pain and the loss and the suffering' of its victims.

In a full day of evidence that focused on the early stages of the pandemic and the decision to introduce the first lockdown, Mr Johnson also defended the under-fire former health secretary Matt Hancock.