Health minister plays down ‘selective’ leaked messages suggesting Hancock rejected advice on care home Covid testing - live

Key events

Kieran Mullan (Con) claims Labour has misled the public about the government’s record on handling the pandemic. He says Labour should apologise for that. Labour said the UK had the worst death toll in Europe, but its record wasn’t the worst, and was broadly in line with France’s and Germany’s, he says.

Whately agrees. She says the country needs to reflect on what happened.

Whately says, if Labour was in power, she is sure that, like the government, it would have tried to make the best decisions in the light of the information available.

Daisy Cooper (Lib Dem) why Jacob Rees-Mogg was able to get a Covid test sent to his home by courier when there was a national shortage of tests.

Whately says she needed a test for her family, and used the same app as everyone else.

Peter Bone (Con) says Labour wants to rewrite history. At the time people did not know what was right or wrong. One of Matt Hancock’s messages said: “Tell me if I’m wrong.” He says the Covid inquiry must consider this. But can it report earlier?

Whateley says at the time there was “a huge amount of uncertainty”.

As for the timing of the inquiry, that is not under the control of ministers, she says.

Sir Oliver Heald (Con) says what was are seeing today is “trial by media”.

Whately agrees. She says the public inquiry should be allowed to do its job.

Whately is responding to Kendall.

She says the government had to limit testing at first. The courts have backed the decisions taken by the government about whom to prioritise, she says.

She says the WhatsApp messages that have been published are selective. Advice was given in other places. The evidence has been given to the inquiry, she says.

She quotes from an email sent after the WhatsApp exchanges reported by the Telegraph saying everyone going into care home should be tested “as capacity allows”.

Ministers did all they could to protect people, including the most vulnerable, she says.

She says Kendall was happy to support what the government was doing at the time. This is not the right time to play political games, she says.

Liz Kendall, the shadow social care minister, asks why Matt Hancock ignored medical advice to test all people going into care homes. She says relatives of people who died will be “appalled” by his attempt to rewrite history.

Ministers suggests WhatsApp leak gives 'limited and at times misleading' impression of Hancock's care home policy

Helen Whately, the health minister, is responding to the urgent question.

She says Matt Hancock set ambitious targets for testing. “The importance of testing was never in doubt, and there was full agreement on that in every part of government,” she says.

But she says at the start the government did not have the capacity to do mass testing.

The government built the largest testing capacity in Europe, she says.

She says “selective snippets” of WhatsApp conversations give a “limited and at times misleading” impression as to what happened.

PMQs - snap verdict

That was an unremarkable and easily forgettable PMQs. Neither Keir Starmer nor Rishi Sunak were particularly on form and, amongst the party leaders, Stephen Flynn probably did best, with a zinger of a question on Brexit. (See 12.16pm.)

Starmer adopted a scattergun approach, going from one issue to another. His questions, crafted to make a point rather than elicit an answer, were fine, but none of them were particularly new or powerful, and because he was trying to cover so much ground, it meant that it was hard to know what his main point was.

At least a couple of times Sunak responded by avoiding the question altogether. Some of his retorts were reasonably effective in debating terms, but he did not “land” a serious message overall. CCHQ is trying hard at the moment to argue that Labour’s policy programme is just a catalogue of “unfunded commitments”. At the election, this will be an important debate. But the CCHQ material is not really getting an audience at all, at the moment. As Starmer pointed out, after the mini-budget, CCHQ has lost credibility on this issue.

Keir Starmer has received a surprise endorsement from Isabel Oakeshott.

Joanna Cherry (SNP) says she and Sunak have both had to sort out consitutional messes caused by Boris Johnson. Sunak said Northern Ireland would benefit from being in the EU single market. If NI can have a special status, why can’t Scotland have one?

Sunak says Scotland has a special status – “inside the United Kingdom”.

Craig Tracey (Con) asks if stopping illegal crossings remains a piority?

Sunak says the government must do more. “As soon as the legislation is ready” it will be published, he says.

Cat Smith (Lab) asks about a hosptial supposed to be one of the government’s “40 new hospitals”. But no development is happening, she says.

Sunak says, as well as the 40 hospitals, there are 90 upgrades. The government is backing the NHS, he says.

Sarah Champion (Lab) says 79 people have been killed on smart motorways. She says the government is still rolling them out. They are “death trap roads”. Why is that justified?

Sunak says last year the rollout was paused. Safety is a priority, he says.

Virginia Crosbie (Con) asks if the government will develop more nuclear power.

Sunak says the govenrment is committed to more nuclear power plants, and that Crosbie’s constituency, Ynys Môn, would make a good site for a development.

Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster, says Sunak said yesterday access to the single market was special, exciting and attractive. Why is Sunak denying it to the rest of the country.

Sunak says it is disappointing that Flynn is playing politics with this. Northern Ireland has a special place in the UK.

Flynn says Sunak was more positive about the single market than Keir Starmer.

Does it hurt the prime minister to know that the Labour party believes in Brexit more than he does?

Sunak says this is about getting the right mechanisms in place for Northern Ireland, not about the macro issues around Brexit.

Philip Dunne (Con) welcomes the deal on the NI protocol, and asks if the UK will rejoin the Horizon programme.

Sunak says the UK will continue to work with the EU on a range of areas.