Procurement Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Committee stage
Monday 11th July 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 30 but just want to say that I agree with Amendment 33, in which my noble friend Lord Wallace asks why suppliers from outside the UK are likely to want to compete for contracts for the supply of services. Amendments 34 and 35 remind us that there are a wide range of different bodies that need to be able to tender for services, probably mainly local, but they should not be either excluded formally or informally as a result of this Bill.

Returning to Amendment 30, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for her helpful introduction and I want to raise with the Minister matters that we will be returning to in Clauses 41 and 108. As the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has laid an amendment that includes health and social care services supplied for the benefit of individuals, there are questions that need to be raised. Had we been debating the second group of government amendments today, I would have covered this topic in the Minister’s Amendment 526 as well.

Clause 108 sets out the disapplication for this Bill in relation to procurement by NHS England, but Section 79 of the Health and Care Act talks about

“health care services for the purposes of the health service in England, and … other goods or services that are procured together with those health care services.”

It goes on to define a relevant authority in healthcare services in subsection (7) as

“(a) a combined authority;


(b) an integrated care board;

(c) a local authority in England;

(d) NHS England;

(e) an NHS foundation trust;

(f) an NHS trust established under section 25”.

The problem is that that definition excludes certain parts of health services. For example, an integrated care board will be commissioning, but not procuring directly, some services to primary and secondary care organisations. However, not all NHS organisations are covered by the relevant authority in the healthcare definition. For example, a GP surgery might be a private partnership or a company employing surgery staff including GPs. This might be UK based or even an overseas company, but not a trust or any of the other definitions. The same definition also exists for dentists’ surgeries. I was wondering if the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, was thinking that this type of organisation would be covered by her amendment. Most of them are small organisations.

I ask the Minister this question of principle, really as advance warning that we will return to it later in the Bill. Why are health services, clinical and

“other goods or services that are procured together with those health care services”,

going to have a completely different procurement regime entirely delegated to the relevant Secretary of State, who can enact it by SI? That can ignore all the important clauses that we are debating in this Bill—value for money, value for society, transparency and the technical elements critical for anybody wishing to procure goods and services using money from the public purse, except for those parts of the health service that do not fall into that definition in the Health and Care Act, which will have to abide by the Procurement Bill.

Secondly, can the Minister advise on exactly where the dividing line is for those parts of the health service that are commissioned by other parts of it, but do not fall under the definition? It would be perfectly logical to have a contractor team preparing a bid for a contract with a regional consortium that includes a hospital trust and a non-NHS body, perhaps a charity—exactly the sort of small organisation that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, referred to—that worked with patients. It would have to remember, if syringes were included in that PFI contract for the new wing, for example, when the NHS procurement system would therefore be used, that there would be an entirely different set of rules, processes, et cetera, compared with a contract for a hospital trust that covered only non-clinical items, and therefore used the terms in this Bill.

This will be horribly messy. It will not just be confusing for contractors, which will need teams fully au fait with where the dividing line is between the completely different rules that will apply, but I suspect it will be total chaos inside the NHS. Can the Minister explain the thinking behind this and where the differences are? If possible, could we have a meeting with him and other noble Lords interested in the interface between this Bill and the Health and Care Act legislation, and in how it will work in practice?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 33 and 34, but I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Brinton for highlighting the need to make sure that this Bill and the Health and Care Act do not contradict each other. I was struck by a speech by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, at the Second Reading of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill the other week, in which he suggested that the Minister consider whether definitions of freedom of speech in the Online Safety Bill and the higher education Bill were compatible. The noble Lord very much doubted that they were. In spite of the current chaos within the Government, they need to ensure that different Bills going through in the same Session are compatible and do no cut across each other.

Amendments 33 and 34 are concerned with light-touch contracts. Amendment 33 is purely a probing amendment. We wish to understand the circumstances in which suppliers from outside the UK are likely to want to compete for contracts of the sort that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, suggested would be covered under the light-touch system—primarily, the provision of personal and social services to be delivered on the ground, in local communities, by people with sufficient local knowledge to be effective.

My concern here was heightened by the outsourcing of the initial test and trace contracts to two large companies, one of which has its headquarters in Miami, Florida, and neither of which has any appropriate expertise in local delivery or geography. Not surprisingly, therefore, testing stations were set up in inconvenient places and local volunteers, who offered to assist in large numbers, were often ignored. My colleague, my noble friend Lord Purvis, would have wished to ask whether the new trade agreements the DIT is negotiating would nevertheless open these contracts to overseas companies, including those from non-English speaking countries. Can the Minister therefore explain and justify the paragraph concerned?

Amendment 34 would put in the Bill the importance of local provision of services and the constructive role that non-profit entities can play in the provision of services in which sympathy, personal relationships and concern for welfare above immediate profit are important parts of the motivation for those who work in them and in which volunteers can also contribute to effective supply. My experience here is mainly from the care home sector, although I believe the argument stretches a good deal more widely than that. Private companies, including offshore-based private equity companies, have made excessive profits out of care home provision in a number of cases. Noble Lords will be familiar with Terra Firma, which the Minister will recall is based in the Channel Islands. That is why I have a later amendment that challenges the question of whether companies based in the Crown dependencies and overseas territories should be considered UK suppliers—but there are other examples.

General Elections: Peers’ Exclusion from Voting

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Monday 23rd March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I would have to look closely at the 1999 Act to be assured that they remain disqualified. I was not aware of that.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, do not the questions that we have heard in the past few minutes demonstrate exactly why we need complete reform of the arrangements for your Lordships’ House, to ensure that we have an effective bicameral system appropriate for the 21st century?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there is a very strong case for substantial constitutional reform. I fear—as I hope others may fear—that there may be a low turnout and an indecisive result at the election. That may at last push us towards a larger scheme of constitutional reform.

Church of England: Appointment of Bishops

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Monday 14th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Church of England is moving with all deliberate speed towards the appointment of women bishops. I think it quite possible that the first women bishops will be consecrated before we have reached the next stage of House of Lords reform.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, synthesising the two previous questions, will the Minister tell us how many women clerics are in a senior position in the Church of England? Does he agree that a large number of vacancies might be helpful for the promotion of the majority of very good senior women to bishoprics as and when the Church of England approves their appointment?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It is desirable that dioceses nevertheless continue to appoint bishops. I know a number of senior women in the Church of England and have a great deal of respect for them. One of them is the wife of my good friend the Vicar of Putney. I have no doubt that in time, the Church of England will have a number of excellent women bishops in the same way that it now has a number of excellent archdeacons, canons, and others from the female sex.

Representation of the People (Election Expenses Exclusion) Order 2013

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, in responding to points from the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, we hope that they are very successful in selecting their candidates. Noble Lords will not be surprised, however, if I do not necessarily wish them success in being elected. But it is a challenge to my party to make sure that we can similarly find some candidates. It will also come as no surprise to the Committee that we broadly and warmly welcome this draft order which, as the Minister says, will enable disabled candidates to apply for and use the fund specifically created to encourage them to be candidates by excluding those moneys from the schedule of election expenses. It is clearly a shame that it was not thought of when the fund was established, but we are pleased, as the noble Lord, Lord Low, said, that it will be done by 26 March, in time for this year’s election. Unsurprisingly, the charities representing people with disabilities, most notably Scope, are also supportive of the thrust of the measure.

The Minister will have read the discussions of the House of Commons committee on this. Perhaps it is a bit late to regret, along with it, that the fund does not cover parish council elections. Indeed, for many people, that is their first attempt at the ballot box, and it might have encouraged more disabled people to make that same first attempt. However, this is a pilot, and we hope that if it is successful it will be rolled out in a comprehensive way.

My questions, therefore, are not about what might have been but about this specific order, which allows the fund expenditure to be excluded. Will the Minister confirm that anything that the fund agrees to finance will then automatically be covered by the exclusion? In other words, there will be no additional formality to be gone through? We do not want the fund saying that it is covered and then being told afterwards that it is not. There needs to be just one lot of decision-takers, and I assume that it will be the fund decision-takers. It would be useful to have that confirmed.

What is being done to promote awareness of the fund? In preparation for today, I did the usual thing and tried to find out about it. I found it impossible to locate the fund through the Electoral Commission’s less-than-helpful website. Google was rather more helpful and got me on to the relevant site. Given that the Electoral Commission wants to be involved in this, I would have thought that it would do more to make knowledge of the fund better known, rather than simply being able to find out about this specific order, which is not of interest to disabled people once it is done.

Information on the fund itself was not brilliant. I could not get hold of the application form from the website although it has now been sent to me. It also was not clear how quickly a decision would be made, which I should have thought was also quite important for candidates to decide whether to go ahead. They need to know that before they start spending too much of their own money. Although we are keen for the Electoral Commission to be involved in encouraging and helping disabled people to be candidates, we hope that it will smarten up its own access via the web in time to do this.

We very much support the exclusion of fund expenditure but rather like the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, we wonder whether this leaves a transparency gap. It would be useful to know what disclosure of such funds and their use will be made. Mention was made of a voluntary system, and I wonder whether that is sufficient or whether the fund should itself be transparent. It would be useful to know the Government’s thinking on that. Finally, can the Government assure us that if this pilot proves a success, it will be rolled out fully and with money following intent? As we know, the groups who will benefit from this are highly underrepresented at the moment. Indeed, I cannot believe that this Government would have so undermined the lives of so many disabled people as they have done both under the Welfare Reform Act and now the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill had we had more people as MPs, or indeed Peers, but especially MPs, from those particularly affected groups. We very much want this fund to be a success and we hope that its administrators, the Electoral Commission and the Government will play a very full part in helping disabled people to find out about the fund and then stand for and be elected to public office. I am sorry, but I hope that they will all be Labour if they get elected.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank those who have spoken for their general welcome for this order. I stress that this is a pilot and an experiment in some ways. I also stress that it is absolutely an all-party initiative. We very much hope, as the noble Baroness has suggested, that all parties will want to take this up and make use of it, and that part of the way in which information will spread out is that all parties will wish to inform their local associations to look more actively for potential candidates for whom this would make the crucial difference.

In the disability world, the communications strategy is already a good deal better known than in the general outside world. I had not heard of it until a few weeks ago but I am told that the Government have a comprehensive communications strategy in place. There have been a number of news stories in the press, and in tweets, blogs and the like, targeted very much at the disability community. This will continue as the pilot rolls on.

As for the question of what happens in August 2014, this is a pilot over which we will want to consult as we go along, as well as seeing how many people come forward. Once the SI ends, we will ensure that there is a smooth transition to the new regime, if by then a decision is made that the fund is seen as worthwhile and is to be extended. So far there have been about 30 applications for the fund, and the average per application is between £4,000 and £6,000. We are not talking about enormous amounts. Noble Lords will recall that there is a £20,000 maximum per application under the fund at the moment. However, we hope that this will be shown to make a crucial difference in making it easier for people with different disabilities to put themselves forward for election.

In the pilot we decided not to include parish councils. A great many parish councils do not have elections. At my party’s spring conference, I talked to a local activist from West Yorkshire. He told me how deeply unpopular he has made himself with a number of other politicians in his ward, because he keeps insisting that there should be elections for the parish council. Others think that elections are an unnecessary expense and that co-option is much to be preferred, this being a predominantly Conservative parish council. Perhaps one of the questions that we will investigate and discuss further, and come to a different decision on as we move forwards from the pilot, is whether we include parish council elections, in which many people first cut their electoral teeth, as the noble Baroness rightly says.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, asks whether it will be retrospective. The answer is that it will not, but those who have already approached the fund for support for this coming May’s elections will be able to roll their applications in and it will not go back further than that.

[Baroness Brinton]

I thank the Minister for giving way. I am concerned that some people who have applied to the fund for grants have not yet stood for office but clearly intend to be candidates. I would not want them to be compromised in that position because they had had an early grant. It would be useful if some reassurance could be sought to protect them.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I will need to investigate exactly what the position is there and will write to the noble Baroness. I understand that those who are not yet in the election campaign for this May but who have had grants already to help them in their campaigning will come under this order once it has been passed. I will check whether that counts as a degree of retrospection and return to her.

I have already answered the question about whether the Government will ensure that there is no gap on the expiry of the pilot. My very clear understanding is that any spending covered by the fund will automatically be under scrutiny. That is the purpose of the order. Certainly, my reading of it suggests that that is absolutely one on one and that no difference is allowed in that regard. I was asked how quickly decisions will be made. They will be made as quickly as possible. Our concern in all this is to make a significant difference to the decisions that disabled people may make on whether they can manage to stand for election, and to encourage others to work with them by recognising that they have the ability to cope with all the strains of elections.

The noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, asked me how clear the policy was. As he will know, the fund administrator, Convey, will manage this on behalf of the Government and it will clearly set out on the fund website its policy approach to funding decisions, explaining the principles used to assess an applicant’s disability needs. This will also be reflected in the guidance document and updated, if necessary, on a quarterly basis. For fund applications over a certain limit, an advisory council will offer more expert advice. Convey has agreed drafting with the Electoral Commission and will introduce these proposed changes on the fund website before this SI comes into force.

On the question of spending returns and transparency, Convey has agreed to amend the fund’s guidance to encourage successful applicants voluntarily to disclose any fund awards on their election spending returns at all elections. A suitable form of wording to this effect has been agreed with the commission, so we are working very closely with the Electoral Commission on all this. Every effort is being made to take decisions as quickly as we can. We want to make sure, as far as possible, that this pilot is seen to be a success, that it does make a significant difference, and that after we have seen the impact on this year’s elections and the impact it may have on the selection of parliamentary candidates for the next set of elections, we will be able to agree that the pilot fund should be converted into a longer-term fund, perhaps with a number of tweaks and amendments, which we hope all parties and all those interested in democratic politics with diverse representation will wish to accept. I commend the order.

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Tuesday 23rd October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

We are well aware of this problem. We are talking about a culture change within Whitehall. We are conscious that it is often easier when drawing up a large contract to give it to a prime contractor who will then subcontract, rather than having to go through the more onerous processes of distributing it around the country. That is part of the culture that we are trying to change.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, the Minister’s earlier response on the problem with large companies was illuminating. However, if we are going to rely on investigating journalists to uncover such cases, would it not be better for the Government to consider forcing large companies to publish how many days they take to pay people in their annual reports?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I dare say that that is a question which will come up if and when we next move on to a company law reform Bill.

European Union Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, Article 170 says:

“To help achieve the objectives referred to in Articles 26 and 174”,

et cetera,

“the Union shall contribute to the establishment and development of trans-European networks in the areas of transport, telecommunications and energy infrastructures”.

That seems to me very much to give the competences needed.

[Baroness Brinton]

I am grateful for that intervention from my noble friend Lord Wallace, which was much more informed than I could possibly have given.