FORMER health secretary Matt Hancock should have been sacked by the Prime Minister and leaves behind a “damning legacy”, Labour’s shadow health secretary has said.

Jonathan Ashworth told BBC Breakfast: “Boris Johnson should have had the guts, the spine, the awareness, the judgment, to sack him on Friday. It’s not just the situation that he found himself in where he’s breaking the rules where he writes the rules themselves.

“Over 12 months now he failed to protect the care homes. He didn’t put a protective ring around care homes and that had tragic consequences. He sent NHS staff to the frontline to face a ferocious, deadly virus and they didn’t have the correct PPE. The test and tracing system, billions have been spent on it and it hasn’t worked.

“We still don’t pay people decent sick pay. The Delta variant reached our shores because our borders were not secure. So, I don’t think that is a record to be proud of. I think that is a damning legacy.”

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Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said Hancock did not resign straight away because he “wanted to stay focused” on tackling coronavirus. Appearing on Sky News on Trevor Phillips On Sunday, he rejected that Hancock had only stood down because criticism from others had started to mount.

Ashworth said appointing the “architect of austerity” Sajid Javid as the new Health Secretary is akin to “putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop”. He highlighted that 5.1 million people were on the waiting list, cancer treatments were delayed and young people were struggling to access mental health care, some of which was because the NHS entered the coronavirus crisis “on the back of 10 years of underfunding” and “cutbacks”.

Ashworth added: “Sajid Javid was responsible for that. He was a Treasury minister. He was a leading advocate for, indeed an architect of, the austerity that has afflicted the NHS these last 10 years, which has weakened it.

“In many ways making him Health Secretary, given his record as an architect of austerity, it’s a bit like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.”

Shadow housing secretary Lucy Powell said the fact that Johnson did not sack Hancock shows the Prime Minister “has a very dangerous blind spot when it comes to issues of integrity and conduct in public life”.

She told Trevor Phillips On Sunday: “And that’s a really big problem, it’s a bigger problem when you’re in the middle of a pandemic and you’re asking the public to also have integrity and conduct in the way that they go about their own lives.”

Labour will push for Hancock to be stripped of the £16,000 of severance pay he is entitled to by law. Powell said people would be “appalled to think that there’s going to be a severance payment to Matt Hancock in this circumstance”.

It has not been confirmed whether Hancock will take the payment.

Meanwhile, Javid’s promotion to UK Health Secretary has been described by Dominic Cummings as “awful” for the NHS. Johnson’s former chief adviser, who says he “tricked” the Prime Minister into firing Javid as chancellor, lashed out following Hancock’s resignation.

Cummings claimed that Boris Johnson’s wife was behind the appointment.

He tweeted: “So Carrie appoints Saj! NB If I hadn’t tricked PM into firing Saj, we’d have had a HMT with useless SoS/spads, no furlough scheme, total chaos instead of JOINT 10/11 team which was a big success.

“Saj = bog standard = chasing headlines + failing = awful for NHS. Need #RegimeChange.”