Latest news with #MattHancock
The Sun
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
EFL club release ‘gorgeous work of art' kit to celebrate 150th anniversary and even rival fans want to buy it
PORT VALE have released a stunning retro home kit to celebrate their 150th anniversary. The League One new-boys' smart new strip has been flying off the shelves since its release. 2 The Valiants' 2025-26 white home shirt will include a smart black collar, as well as black trim on the sleeves, It will also subtly include the Puma logo, in addition to a retro Port Vale logo. The shirt is not sullied by a garish sponsor, instead oozing a simple class. Vale's kit is topped off with black shorts, also featuring the retro logo, as well as stripey black and white socks. The Staffordshire side, who finished second in League Two, have confirmed that they have already flogged 1,815 home shirts on its first day on sale. For context, Vale averaged home gates of 7,639 last season. Port Vale's kit launch has also been resoundingly well received online. BEST ONLINE CASINOS - TOP SITES IN THE UK 2 While a second wrote: "Stunning kit. They always look miles better without a sponsor too." A third commented: "Best kit I've seen for a long long time. Fulham fan." Birmingham become first EFL club to win promotion as Tom Brady's club bounce back to Championship at first attempt And a fourth swooned: "Sweet Jesus. So simple and yet so stunning." Another asked: "Is it appropriate for a Wednesday fan to purchase this?" Port Vale CEO Matt Hancock said: "I'm proud that we can mark the beginning of our 150th anniversary season with the launch of our brand-new 2025/26 home shirt. "The design rightly honours and helps us to reflect on our past, whilst we can also make positive steps forward in an exciting season back in League One. "I'd like to personally thank the members of our Supporter Advisory Board, who were presented the crest concept at their inaugural meeting. "The group continues to help us shape decisions and we're delighted that they will be involved throughout such an important season."
Daily Mirror
22-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mirror
Matt Hancock gives verdict on botched Covid 'test and trace' operation
Former health secretary Matt Hancock is grilled at the Covid-19 Inquiry about setting up a privatised "test and trace" service which failed to prevent repeated lockdowns Matt Hancock has defended Britain's botched pandemic 'test and trace' operation at the Covid-19 Inquiry which failed to prevent repeated lockdowns. The former Health Secretary outsourced the nation's vital contact tracing rather than beefing up existing NHS and local public health laboratories and its failure contributed to the need for further lockdown measures. The disgraced ex-minister blamed health leaders for being unable to scale up testing laboratories, insisting 'Public Health England didn't have the operational capacity to scale [up]' The Tories' privatised 'NHS Test and Trace' operation was set up in May 2020 costing £37 billion and led by Mr Hancock's friend, Tory Peer Baroness Dido Harding. Outsourcing firms like Serco were paid millions to call people and advise them to self-isolate but used agency call centre staff paid the minimum wage who were largely not medically trained. The former I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here contestant said: 'The critical thing is that we absolutely must, as a nation, be ready to expand and radically expand testing capacity. Once the test is developed, I had to do that. 'And there are critics who said that it was done in the wrong way. What matters is that it's done and it is planned for next time to be ready to be done.' PM Boris Johnson promised a " world beating" system but the Public Accounts Committee later found NHS Test and Trace failed in its main objective of breaking chains of COVID-19 transmission. A BBC investigation at the time showed only half of close contacts were being reached in some areas. Mr Hancock said Public Health England (PHE) 'proved entirely incapable of expanding that testing capacity', adding: 'It was a cottage industry and we needed industrial scale capacity'. The inquiry heard how Mr Hancock set up a contract tracing system 'from scratch' rather than providing the funding to upgrade local authority labs and facilities run by PHE. The barrister questioning Mr Hancock on behalf of the inquiry asked whether he was aware that local contact tracing systems already existed. Sophie Cartright KC said: 'Did you appreciate that, that the directors of public health within local authority is discharged and performed the role of contact tracing? There was this resource in every local authority across the United Kingdom that had the resources.' Mr Hancock responded: 'Of course I appreciated that. There was one person in each of the upper tier local authorities and therefore, around 100 people, brilliant people, I engaged with a huge number of them throughout the pandemic. But the idea that they alone could have solved this problem was, unfortunately, the wrong attitude.' Mr Hancock resigned as health secretary in 2021 after admitting breaching social distancing guidance after photos showed him in a romantic embrace with colleague Gina Coladangelo. Lack of NHS testing capacity meant testing everyone who had Covid symptoms had to be abandoned early in the pandemic once 'community transmission' was established in the UK. Mr Hancock told the inquiry: 'The doctrine that we had going into the pandemic, that was shared by most of the Western world and the World Health Organisation, was wrong. 'The advice I received from Public Health England was that we should not need or try to test at scale or contact trace at scale as soon as there was community based transmission. There was no point in testing and contact tracing any further outside of hospitals because, effectively, everybody was going to get infected. 'That was the wrong attitude and it is absolutely critical that next time there's a pandemic… we are ready to take the actions to stop it spreading and protect the most vulnerable first.' He concluded: 'The single most important thing is to conclude that the industrial scale, expansion of testing is necessary and we need to be ready to do it.'
BBC News
15-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Matt Hancock ignored call to test all NHS staff, Covid inquiry hears
The government ignored an early warning by two Nobel prize-winning scientists that all healthcare workers should be routinely tested for coronavirus in the pandemic, the Covid inquiry has advice came in a strongly-worded letter sent in April 2020 by the chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute, Sir Paul Nurse, and its research director, Sir Peter Ratcliffe, to the then health secretary Matt and care home staff were not offered Covid tests until November 2020 in England, unless they had symptoms of the Hancock is due to appear at the inquiry next week, along with other health ministers from the four nations of the UK. Giving evidence, Sir Paul, who won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2001, said it was "disturbing" that he did not receive a response to his concerns until July 2020."For the secretary of state to ignore a letter from two Nobel laureates in physiology or medicine for three months is a little surprising, I would say," he told the inquiry."Rather than acknowledge they couldn't do it, because that would have indicated a mistake in their overall strategy, they remained silent."It was likely that the decision not to routinely test NHS and care home staff led to an increase in infections and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic, he added. Hospitals and care homes In the first six months of Covid, there was a frantic drive to increase testing for the disease. Matt Hancock set a target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April 2020 in this time it had become clear to scientists across the world that Covid could be spread by people who had not developed any symptoms of the disease, such as a cough or Paul Nurse, Sir Peter Ratcliffe and their colleague Dr Sam Barrell wrote to Mr Hancock on 14 April 2020 saying they had "grave concerns" about "asymptomatic transmission" between healthcare staff and patients."We advise you that all NHS trusts and healthcare providers should be required to set up surveillance systems for the regular testing of all healthcare workers and patients with immediate effect," the letter scientists received a response on 6 July 2020, signed by a junior official in the Department of Health. That reply did not directly address the subject of healthcare workers, instead stating that testing was a "key part" of the government's strategy and that capacity was being "rapidly expanded". Lighthouse labs The Frances Crick Institute, headquartered in north London, is one of the largest biomedical research centres in the Covid hit, a team of 300 volunteers started using the organisation's laboratory space and equipment to process Covid tests for dozens of hospitals, GP surgeries and care homes in the local had the capacity to carry out 4,000 tests a day and to increase that to 10,000 with more funding, according to Prof March 2020, he wrote to the government offering to help with the national testing ministers decided to set up a network of giant privately-run Lighthouse his evidence, Prof Nurse accepted that the larger sites were needed, but said "insufficient attention" was paid to universities and other publicly-funded institutions, which could have more quickly processed tests for healthcare sixth part of the Covid inquiry, which looks at the performance of test, trace and quarantine systems across the UK, runs until the end of May.
Times
12-05-2025
- Business
- Times
HMRC calls in thousands of documents in Babylon investigation
Thousands of documents have been handed over to HM Revenue & Customs as part of its investigation into the tax affairs of Babylon, the healthcare technology group that was championed by Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, before collapsing into administration. Officials have been investigating tax matters relating to the period before the appointment in August 2023 of administrators from Alvarez & Marsal over Babylon Partners, the main British operating company. In a recent update to creditors, the administrators said HMRC had issued a section 36 notice in December 'obliging it to disclose a large volume of information from its books and records'. • The app that promised an NHS 'revolution' then went down in flames Following a review by administrators, they shared 3,642 documents
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
Five years on: how Covid changed sport for better and for worse
Sound the trumpets, beat the drum, let loose the buttock-rockets of hope. One of the strangest and most unsatisfying things about the Covid-19 pandemic, among a great many deeply strange and unsatisfying things, is that it never actually had a shared end date or ceremonial send-off. Jarringly so, because this was a period in the national life built around a rigid roster of public events. The numerical rules. The weekly banging of pots in honour of people you secretly consider to be serfs. Such unlikely figures as health secretary Matt Hancock appearing in public every day in order to say inauthentic-sounding things about public health, all the while resembling the doomed subcommander of an imperial space galleon who keeps announcing that he's got the situation under control sir, just as the bridge behind him is cleaved in two and he's sucked out into a skull-popping deep space inferno. All these things happened in lockstep. The pandemic had a start date. But the closest we got to a national throwing-off of the shackles, our own VV day, was July 2021 and the sight of a lone England football supporter placing a flare between his buttock cheeks before releasing it into the skies above central London. This was our healing moment, our iconography of closure, our own white cliffs and union flags. Sport: always delivering. As it did that same evening with the commemorative Wembley Stadium riots. But for now the other strange thing about the plague times is that nobody wants to talk about it. Understandably so. It was horrible, traumatic and confusing. But the fact remains for sport this week does bring a significant pandemic anniversary. Not of the end or the beginning, but of the way things began to change, and significantly so. It is five years now since the end of the only month that was entirely empty of sport through the pandemic. It is easy to forget now that this all came pretty much out of nowhere. The week before English football shut down the headlines were Eric Dier leaping into the crowd to confront a fan and Manchester United finally turning a corner with Bruno Fernandes at the wheel because, plus ça change, plus c'est the same thing all over again. The final live football event in the UK was 11 March, Liverpool v Atlético Madrid at Anfield, an occasion that should loom like an undying shadow over Boris Johnson and his government, still in its let-it-run-free herd immunity phase. The official pandemic report concluded 37 people died as a result of the game played at that late stage, a detail that deserves never to be lost. Two days later, Mikel Arteta tested positive, forever enthroned as the Franz Ferdinand of Britain's Covid meltdown. Football took the lead, the Premier League and the EFL calling off their own competitions despite official dithering. Before long Euro 2020 had been suspended, the snooker and cricket put on hold. Two weeks later the Tokyo Olympics was banished to the ghost games of 2021. In the meantime April was a global white out, give or take the odd Belarusian Super league oddity. And by 3 May, five years ago this Saturday, the first stirrings appeared in the soil. World Athletics staged a well meaning but deeply weird back yard video pole vault event featuring Mondo Duplantis. Footballers in England began to train again. Within two weeks the Bundesliga resumed to empty seats. Sport had taken a breath, a moment to think about what this thing is actually for, and what it should look like when the plague was all over. There have been some very clear changes in sport, both in its hierarchies and the basic spectacle, all related to the trials and opportunities of the pandemic. In many ways sport has never recovered, a mark that is most obviously present in the ever-wider separation of power. Look back now and the pandemic was good for Fifa, good for the BCCI, good for Saudi Arabia. It was good for some women's sport. It was bad for athlete welfare, bad for grassroots, participation and children's health. Above all it was terrible for the idea of preserving physical space, the shared sense of ownership of our sporting institutions; another example of sport holding up its own mirror to the rest of the world. Most obviously Covid-19 was good for Gianni Infantino and Fifa. Never let a good crisis go to waste. For Infantino financial and cultural meltdown elsewhere presented a wonderful opportunity to maintain a constant public expression of grave and statesmanlike concern, all the while ramping up his own ambitions. This was the moment Infantino ramped up his full-realised Football Jesus persona, dangling Fifa's cash reserves, pulling rank on every entity that had ever tried to resist its power, taking decisive steps in the shadow-struggle with club football. The sense of an autocratic entity freed from any kind of scrutiny was codified. The expanded Club World Cup flows from this, as does the Saudi World Cup, whisked through without a vote. Other power grabs failed. The European Super League bubbled up and was then bundled out of the door as the returning crowds took to the streets in public protest and also, let's face it, as something to do. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion The Premier League is still counting the cost of that time. Internally there is a sense the pandemic caused a breakdown of trust that has never been restored, present in the Super League shemozzle and fuelled by the loss of revenues, the basic sense of brittleness. The biosecure summer league wrought its own changes, 92 live games in six weeks purely to appease the broadcasters, accompanied only by muffled managerial shrieking, like the sound of somebody being water-boarded next door. Using five substitutes has remained, another little nudge for the more powerful clubs. The primacy of fans, of real-life humans in the physical space, has been chipped away at. Lines have been crossed, ground given up. Late-night kick-off times have stayed. Ticket prices have spiralled. Left alone in the empty grounds, TV took control of the staging, stopping and starting the clock, bossing referees about, and making strides towards some distant end point as a remote spectacle. Absurdly over-geared VAR has at least been slightly scaled back (never forget the outrages of the micro-handball penalty era). Pundits have remained on the pitch, a major step in the cretinising of the show, the guffaws and squeals and clipped-up rants now just part of the entertainment. In cricket this was the period when franchise T20 leagues basically took over. With all other cricket falling apart the biosecure Indian Premier League became the centrepiece of the year, the final in Dubai watched by 200 million people. That model became the dominant one, with time slots carved out, TV-based styling, heavy BCCI/IPL investment. On the plus side women's cricket got a significant boost, the first double-headers introduced as a necessity and then retained as a success. The Hundred got its foot in the door. Elsewhere, the Covid Olympics was dystopian in the flesh, detrimental to athlete welfare, but rescued by the good fortune of a human-scale, beautifully memorable Paris Games last year. Darts had a very good pandemic, discovering a new hunger for its comforts and kitchen sink dramas. Tennis was strange during Covid, freezing its ranking points, losing some veteran players, at times descending into a hallucinogenically weird Novak Djokovic political-legal drama. Boxing flourished and basically became a Saudi gig, as did many other sports. LIV golf, a Saudi Grand Prix and the purchase of Newcastle United were all ushered through as a huge period of progress for anyone willing to suck up the costs, steamroller any protests and leverage their political ambitions. The great tragedy of the opposite end of the scale is the blow to participation, amateur sport and public health. Above all this feels like a missed opportunity. Many participation sports flourished, without fanfare in the pandemic months. At the same the structures of amateur sport were often filleted or left to die. Subsequent studies have suggested a 'lost generation' of young people who simply fell out of sport. Children's physical activity has changed since, a decline stacked around gender and socioeconomic position. Childhood obesity shot up and has persevered in older age groups. Plus of course, as a referred pandemic pain, the cost of living has increased, with physical activity declining most among the poorest. The pandemic lingered on in sport. Planned returns were delayed. A surge in Omicron-based confusion the following Christmas saw football cancelled again, firebreaks talked up, Antonio Conte using a set of mannequins to make up the numbers in Spurs training, without, it is rumoured, any noticeable drop-off in effectiveness. Five years on, sport in the pandemic remains a blurry and confused landscape, at best a story of stratification and progress towards a more remote spectacle. For now it is worth remembering how many acts of sporting administrators are still bound in the losses and commercial paranoia of the time. And how vital is it to retain the right not just to be there in the flesh, but to be central to the show, both as participant and spectator.
