UK government rejects ISC call for inquiry into Russian interference in Brexit referendum – as it happened

• Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, has said the UK should join the US and countries around the world in being more assertive towards China. Speaking at a news conference, he praised Boris Johnson for his decision to exclude the Chinese firm Huawei from the UK’s 5G network, saying that the PM was making a decision in the national interest, and not just responding to pressure from Washington. Pompeo went on:

We think that the entire world needs to work together to ensure that every country – including China – behaves in the international system in ways that are appropriate and consistent with the international order.

You can’t go make claims for maritime regions that you have no lawful claim to. You can’t threaten countries and bully them in the Himalayas. You can’t engage in cover-ups and co-opt international institutions like the World Health Organization …

We want every nation to work together to push back against the Chinese Communist party’s efforts in every dimension that I have described. That certainly includes the United Kingdom, it includes every country.

We hope we can build out a coalition that understands the threat and we’ll work collectively to convince the Chinese Communist party it’s not in their best interests to engage in this kind of behaviour.

• Prof Chris Whitty, the UK government’s chief medical adviser, has dismissed suggestions that ministers ignored scientific advice when they put off ordering a full lockdown until relatively late. In evidence to the Commons health select committee, Whitty said:

Ministers at the time, who were put in an incredibly difficult position, in my view, followed the advice given by Sage [the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies], which are clearly signposted through the minutes of Sage, with a delay that was no more than you would reasonably expect for what are really very difficult things to operationalise and decide.

I do not think – I’m not saying now and I’m not going to say at any point, to be clear – that in my view there was huge delay between the advice that ministers received, given the enormity of the difficulties that we were asking of people, and the practical implications of what was being done.

At a committee last week Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, suggested that ministers did delay following scientific advice to order a lockdown – although it has been reported that Vallance may have misremembered when Sage moved to recommending a full lockdown.

• Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has told MPs that Public Health England was not suited to setting up a national testing programme. Giving evidence to the Commons science committee, he said:

We need a standing capability, right, we need a public health agency that isn’t only brilliant at science, but also is ready to mass scale very, very quickly.

PHE was designed as a scientific organisation, and it is really good as a scientific organisation, and remains so, and has some of the best public health scientists in the world in PHE.

The challenge that it found was it was not set up to be an organisation ready to go to mass national scale and we didn’t go into this crisis with that mass of testing capability.

In that we were like almost every other country in the world. Germany was the exception in this space rather than the norm, and some of the far eastern countries.

Hancock also described his decision to set 100,000 tests a day as a target was a “big, hairy, audacious goal”. He explained:

I’ve been accused of over-promising and sometimes delivering.

And the point is that when you’re handling a pandemic response and the response you need is to scale-up at a speed that is almost unprecedented within government at a national scale, the tools that I found worked were to set demanding goals.

In fact the chancellor told me afterwards that I set a ‘big, hairy, audacious goal’, apparently this is a classic business school doctrine that I didn’t know that I was following.

• NHS chiefs have told the Welsh government the country is likely to need 5,000 extra beds on top of its normal capacity to deal with coronavirus this autumn and winter. As Steven Morris reports, at the government’s weekly press conference health minister Vaughan Gething said some field hospitals would be needed to meet the demand of what he believed would be “a truly extraordinary autumn and winter.”

• A Conservative MP’s behaviour has been branded “completely unacceptable” by his own party, following allegations over WhatsApp texts sent to a young female intern and a male parliament worker. As PA Media reports, Rob Roberts, MP for Delyn, North Wales, is under investigation by the office of the parliamentary commissioner for standards. CCHQ confirmed an investigation is under way, that Roberts has apologised and he is undergoing training in social media.

That’s all from me for today.

Coronavirus coverage continues on our global live blog. It’s here.

Here is my colleague Luke Harding’s analysis of what we’ve learnt from the ISC’s Russia report.

And here is an extract.

Four years on we still don’t know the extent of Russian meddling in the referendum. Nor did we discover if it affected the outcome. The Leave.EU campaign – funded by the Bristol businessman Arron Banks – claims the report exonerates their campaign, which included multiple meetings with the Russian ambassador in London. It doesn’t accuse or clear him; Banks makes a brief appearance in a footnote. The question of how deeply Moscow meddled cannot be answered because it was never asked, the ISC says. As the Scottish National party MP and ISC member Stewart Hosie said on Tuesday, nobody in government wished to go near the Russian meddling issue “with a 10ft barge pole” …

Downing Street has said it will not do what the ISC wants. There will be no cross-Whitehall investigation of the EU referendum, it said after the report was released. This position is short-sighted: Putin is happy to support any political party if it suits his strategic purpose. In the absence of a Mueller-style inquiry, the debate over the legitimacy of the UK’s historic vote to leave the EU will rumble on. Neither side won a knockout blow on Tuesday. But the report fuels suspicion that the victorious Brexiters have something to hide, and will leave remainers feeling a little cheerier.

From the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner

The Electoral Commission has said today’s ISC report on Russia strengthens for the case for it getting new powers to regulate elections. A spokesperson for the commission said:

To safeguard the UK’s elections from foreign interference, the commission continues to recommend that voters be given greater transparency over who is trying to influence them online by requiring all digital campaign materials to include an imprint; that approaches for enhanced due diligence and risk assessment should be adapted from money laundering regulations; and that rules should be introduced to ensure campaigners cannot accept money from companies that have not made enough money in the UK to fund their donation or loan.

As the independent body responsible for overseeing free and fair elections, we will continue to work closely with the UK’s governments to protect the integrity of the UK as a world leading democracy.

Turning back to coronavirus for a moment, the daily UK figure for the latest number of deaths has been published on the government’s dashboard. There have been 110 new deaths, it says, taking the total to 45,422.

This is a Public Health England figure for the UK as a whole. It gets published on the government’s website. But, confusingly, the Department of Health and Social Care has given up publishing this figure as part of its only daily update, because it no longer views it as reliable.

The PHE figure is suspect because it includes people in England who tested positive for coronavirus and died – even if they died of something else.

But the main problem with the headline total is that it is an under-estimate – because it does not include people who died from coronavirus without testing positive. When these deaths are included, total UK coronavirus deaths are more than 55,000.

Here is my colleague Marina Hyde on the ISC’s Russia report.

When parliamentary committees produce reports with recommendations, the government is obliged to publish a considered response, explaining whether or not the recommendations are being accepted. This can take months, and generally responses are a bit waffly. Because a recommendation is an implicit criticism, instead of saying “no”, governments prefer to say “not necessary, because we are already doing X, Y and Z”.

But today we got the official response (pdf) to the ISC report within an hour or so of it being published. And it was more blunt than these documents normally are. Here are eight claims or recommendations in the report that have been rejected by the government.

1 – The government has rejected the ISC’s call for an inquiry into Russian interference in the Brexit referendum. See 11.38am for the full quotes.

2 – The government has rejected claims it “badly underestimated” the threat from Russia. The committee said:

Until recently the government had badly underestimated the Russian threat and the response it required.

In response, the government said:

The government has long recognised there is an enduring and significant threat posed by Russia to the UK and its allies, including conventional military capabilities, disinformation, illicit finance, influence operations, and cyber-attacks. As such, Russia remains a top national security priority for the government.

3 – The government does not accept that responsibility for countering the threat from Russia is “unnecessarily complicated”. Referring to how responsibility is allocated, the committee said:

There are a number of unnecessarily complicated wiring diagrams that do not provide the clear lines of accountability that are needed.

But the government said:

There is a clear line of accountability for HMG’s policy on Russia: the Russia and Ukraine NSIG [national security implemention group] reports to the national security adviser and to ministers on the national security council. Ultimate ministerial oversight is provided by the prime minister.

4 – The government does not accept that MI5 needs to work more closely with the police on the threat from Russia. The committee said:

It is our view that while MI5 already works with the police regional counter-terrorism units (which have responsibility for hostile state activity) there is scope for them to work more closely together in this area.

But the government said:

MI5 has already developed closer working with police and Home Office partners in tackling the threat posed by hostile state activity, including working together closely on a number of hostile state activity cases.

It cited the response to the Salisbury novichok attack as a good example.

5 – The government rejected claims it needed better channels of communication with Russia. The committee said these were needed to “reduce the risk of miscommunication and escalation of hostilities”. The government said channels of communication were in place.

6 – The government refused to commit to giving the Electoral Commission more powers. The committee said:

We have already questioned whether the Electoral Commission has sufficient powers to ensure the security of democratic processes where hostile state threats are involved: if it is to tackle foreign interference then it must be given the necessary legislative powers.

But the government said:

The government notes the committee’s comments on the Electoral Commission and we continue to consider the recommendations from the Electoral Commission itself to enhance their powers. The commission has civil sanctioning powers that apply to referendums and elections. More serious criminal matters can and are referred to the police, and then considered by a court of law.

(Many Brexiters in government would rather abolish the Electoral Commission than give it extra powers. It is one of their least favourite government bodies, not least because of its investigation into Vote Leave.)

7 – The government refused to commit to toughening the Sanctions Act. The committee said:

The NCA also underlined that there are several ways in which the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 is too restrictive. The NCA outlined changes they would wish to see to the legislation:

– including serious and organised crime as grounds for introducing sanctions; and

– providing for closed material proceedings to protect sensitive intelligence in the granting of, and any appeal against, sanctions (the special immigration appeals commission procedures offer a useful model for this).

But the government said the act already had “relevant provisions that would allow for sanctions in the interests of national security, in the interests of international peace and security and to further a foreign policy objective of the government”.

8 – The government rejected claims it had unreasonably delayed publication of the report. The ISC delivered the report to No 10 in time for it to be published before last year’s general election. In its news release the committee said that it was “a matter of great regret” that the report was not published in November, and at the press conference the Labour MP and committee member Kevan Jones said the excuses given by No 10 for the delay were untrue. (See 11.22am.) No 10 has denied this. (See 2.42pm.)

These are from the Labour peer Stewart Wood, who used to be a foreign affairs adviser to Gordon Brown when Brown was PM.

These are from the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Alistair Carmichael on the ISC’s Russia report.

From Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary

Raab says the UK has not been strong-armed by the US. On Huawei, they have had constructive discussions, he says.

Pompeo says the PM’s decision was made on the basis of what was best for the United Kingdom.

Asked if the US has an “end state” for Huawei, he says it doesn’t. Its “end state” is to protect the data of US citizens, he says.

That information should not be in the hands of the Chinese Communist party, he says.

And that’s it. The press briefing is over.

Raab and Pompeo are taking questions now.

Q: Why did the government avoid investigating Russian interference in the referendum?

Raab says the government rejects this claim.

It does investigate what Russia is doing, he says. He says it is not for a second complacent about the threats posed by Russia in cyber.

Q: Do you want the UK to do more on China?

Pompeo says he does not see it like that.

The US wants all sovereign countries to understand the threat posed by China (or the CPC, the Chinese Communist party, as he puts it).

And it wants all nations to push back against China’s behaviour, he says.

Pompeo says he has had a “very productive” conversation with Raab.

He says the Chinese Communist party’s exploitation of the coronavirus crisis has been “disgraceful”.

He praises the UK for the Huawei ban, and for the decision to open its doors to Hongkongers.

The US supports “those sovereign choices”, he says.

He says he hopes the UK-US trade deal will be finalised “before too long”.

And he says they discussed extending the arms embargo on Iran.

The special relationship enabled him and Raab to have “candid, frank discussions”, he says.

Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, and Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, are holding a press briefing now.

Raab starts by summing up the various topics covered in their discussion.