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The Runnymede Trust, a race authority think tank, yesterday won its claim against the Government over the appointment in August 2020 of Baroness Harding as interim executive chair of the National Institute for Health Protection. Mr Hancock was also found to have not complied with public sector equality duty in the appointment the following month of Mike Coupe, the former chief executive of Sainsbury’s, as director of testing for NHS Test and Trace.

Baroness Harding and Mr Coupe were once colleagues at Sainsbury’s.

And Mr Hancock is a friend of the Tory peer, who is the wife of Conservative MP John Penrose.

Lord Justice Singh and Mr Justice Swift granted a declaration to the trust after considering arguments made at a hearing in December.

They found that the appointment processes leading up to the Government’s decisions to hire Baroness Harding and Mr Coupe were “in breach of the public sector equality duty”. The judges dismissed a complaint by the Good Law Project, a campaign group, that the Government had not adopted an “open” process when making appointments to posts “critical to the pandemic response”.

Jason Coppel QC, who led the two organisations’ legal teams, said in court the Government had a “policy or practice” of “making appointments to posts critical to the pandemic response” without adopting any, or any sufficient, “fair or open competitive processes”.

It was suggested that people “outside the tight circle” in which senior Tory politicians and their friends moved were not being given opportunities. Ministers disputed the claims.

By ruling the Government acted unlawfully, the court accepted the Runnymede Trust and Good Law Project’s argument that the recruitment process ignored the need to eliminate discrimination against, and advance equality of opportunity for, disabled and ethnic minority communities in the UK.

Dr Halima Begum, chief executive of the Trust, said the judgment “is incredibly significant to the British people.”

She added: “It shows the importance of the public sector equality duty and its role in protecting the people of this nation from the closed shop of government appointments – not least in a time of national crisis where people from our minority communities were dying from Covid in hugely disproportionate numbers.”

A government spokeswoman said: “We used the skills and expertise of both the public and private sector to rapidly build a world-leading testing infrastructure, speeding up the delivery of tests and ultimately saving more lives, especially amongst the most vulnerable.”

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