Supreme Court Dillon Judgment

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Viscount makes an important and interesting intervention, but there are so many people who are still in such pain and who made huge compromises and sacrifices in order to deliver the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. While I appreciate that the concept of amnesty could be appealing, and there are other mechanisms that could be as appealing, there are those, including me, who want to see as many paramilitaries prosecuted as we can.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, in thanking the Minister for the way she introduced her response to the Statement this afternoon, I link that with thanks to the Secretary of State, Hilary Benn MP, for the way they both engaged with the Joint Committee on Human Rights on the remedial order and the Troubles Bill. Given that scrutiny on those things continues, can she promise us, given that the remedial order was agreed by the committee on the basis of urgency, that it will be expedited and brought forward without any further delay, and that the new amendments, a tranche of which she alluded to in her remarks, will also be brought to the committee to see before it publishes its report on the Bill? Lastly, in the light of Peter May’s recent report raising concerns about the corporate effectiveness and cultural health of the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, will the Government use the forthcoming Bill to address any of the issues identified in the report, enabling the commission to deliver high-quality Article 2-compliant resolutions?

Procurement Act 2023

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

In passing the Health and Care Act 2022, Parliament recognised that healthcare services delivered to NHS patients and service users, such as 999 emergency ambulance services and cancer-screening services, had particular issues and challenges which necessitated special procurement measures. Consequently, as the noble Baroness made clear, the Procurement Act does not include special provisions for those healthcare services.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, during the proceedings on the Procurement Act, the noble Baroness will recall that the House was united in not wishing to see goods made in Xinjiang by slave labour, particularly Uighur Muslims, being brought by public policy into our own supply chains. Can the Minister tell us what this Government are doing to ensure we maintain a prohibition on goods that have been made by Uighur slave labour?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

Abhorrent practices such as these have absolutely no place in public supply chains. The Procurement Act strengthens the rules around excluding suppliers due to serious misconduct anywhere in their operations, including the supply chain.

Cybersecurity and UK Democracy

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I declare non-financial interests as a patron of Hong Kong Watch and vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uyghurs. As my noble friend Lord Fox referred to the sanctions imposed on seven parliamentarians, three years ago yesterday, I should declare that I am one of them. He also said that this should be regarded as a badge of honour; indeed, because my family were sanctioned with me, my feisty daughter set up a WhatsApp group entitled “badge of honour”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, raised the belt and road initiative and the role of the Foreign Secretary. I have one point to make about that. Developing countries, mainly in the global South, now have debts to the belt and road initiative totalling $1 trillion. This has made them extraordinarily subservient and often into vassal states that do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party, particularly in the United Nations. I think the noble Baroness was right to raise the issue of Sri Lanka particularly; it requires greater scrutiny.

The biggest issue that the Intelligence and Security Committee pointed to in its much-delayed report, when it was finally published, was the potential for gullibility on the part of the present Foreign Secretary, but the rest of us too. I put it to the Minister that with a multi-billion-pound trade deficit with China, we are insufficiently resilient and have become far too dependent. This is extraordinarily complacent in the circumstances. Is she surprised that her right honourable friend Sir Iain Duncan Smith said yesterday that the right honourable Oliver Dowden’s Statement was

“an elephant giving birth to a mouse”?—[Official Report, Commons, 25/3/24; col 1266.]

The Deputy Prime Minister said it had been “swift and robust”, yet it is three years since these cyberattacks took place. That hardly makes it swift. As for robust, while parliamentarians have been sanctioned, frankly I regard that as a very minor issue in comparison with what has happened in Xinjiang, where there are 1 million Uighurs incarcerated in camps; with the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong, where there are 1,700 people incarcerated, some of them, such as Jimmy Lai, on trial even as we meet; and with the untold brutality we have seen in Tibet and the daily intimidation of Taiwan. In those circumstances, there are no grounds for being complacent.

In being robust, why is it that no public official in Hong Kong has yet been sanctioned, yet our ally the United States has sanctioned 47? What co-operation do we have with our key allies, including examining the extent of the APT31 attacks, which have been estimated in the United States as being far more significant in their magnitude than they have been here? Will the Minister re-examine the 2023 report of the Intelligence and Security Committee on the dangers posed to the United Kingdom by the CCP regime? Will she re-examine the strategic failure to declare China a threat, which was, after all, one of the recommendations of your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee, on which I served, which examined the question of China trade and security? Will we place China in the enhanced tier of the foreign registration scheme?

The Minister has mentioned Hikvision, and I pay tribute to her for the way in which she interacted when that issue was before the House as we considered the Procurement Bill; she was helpful throughout. What progress has been made in removing Hikvision surveillance cameras, of which there are about 1 million in this country, from sensitive sites? The Deputy Prime Minister said yesterday that he was open to the removal of Hikvision cameras from other sites too; what progress is being made in that regard?

The noble Lord, Lord Fox, mentioned electric cars. There was a very disturbing article in the Telegraph a few days ago about how these cars could be used for surveillance purposes. Will we allow slave labour to again be used in Xinjiang to manufacture parts and cars that can be sold cheaply into our markets while we do not give British workers the chance to manufacture such things here? Will we have to act retrospectively—as we did with Hikvision and Huawei, and now in the future will probably have to do with electric cars? Is this not just another case of closing the gate after the horse has bolted?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for all he does in relation to educating us on China. I cannot agree with everything he says, but I agree with the points he made about debts building up on the belt and road, and the importance of his committee’s report, which I think I will take away with me. I am going to America; I might take it away with me to read and have a fuller look at over Easter.

We have seen China’s continued disregard for universal human rights—in Xinjiang, as well as what the noble Lord mentioned about the stifling of opposition in Hong Kong and, of course, the aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea. He is right to call these points out.

I think that the noble Lord was asking about the foreign influence registration scheme’s enhanced tier, and it is important to remember that all foreign powers, including China, will be subject to the requirements under the political influence tier of FIRS. No country is there yet but the Government are currently considering which foreign powers and entities should be added to the enhanced tier, which requires collective agreement. As you would expect, these considerations will take into account what is necessary to protect the safety and interests of the UK.

The noble Lord was keen to mention the importance of working with allies. I could not agree with him more on that, and it has been pleasing that, in parallel to the UK this week, the United States has made designations. The targeting of parliamentary entities in New Zealand has also been called out, and statements of support have been issued by the European Union, by some individual member states, and by Japan and the Republic of Korea. The Deputy Prime Minister was in Japan and Korea last week trying to do exactly the sort of international co-ordination that is so important, given the borderless nature of many of these threats that we are now facing.

Regarding Hikvision, we are due to produce a report fairly soon, thanks to the noble Lord, and I cannot anticipate that, but I am very aware that when I make promises to him in this House, I take great pleasure in delivering them whenever I can. So that is certainly on the agenda, as is the work we are doing under the Procurement Act to make sure that we make use of the new provisions on security in due course. There has, I think, been some briefings for Lords and MPs from Minister Burghart on that, as he is taking that forward.

Regarding electric cars, obviously we are determined to make sure that the UK remains one of the best locations in the world for auto manufacturing—we have such a long tradition—and that includes the transition to electric vehicles. But, as is standard practice, we must ensure that any investment in UK manufacturing facilities, for any purpose, poses no threat to our national security. We are determined to do just that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, will the noble Baroness say something more about the hacking of the database of 40 million British people in a year when there will be a general election? Although the Government seem to be confident that it will not compromise the electoral process, does the noble Baroness think that this could be used to spread disinformation and propaganda? Has she not seen the kind of mischief-making done at a very minimal level, almost on a daily basis—often by social media but sometimes in a systematic way—to try to determine the outcome? It has only to happen in a few marginal seats to have a very significant effect in a general election. What estimate has been made of that and what more can we do about it?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

We now have a senior FCDO civil servant as CEO of the Electoral Commission. Indeed, he has joined the Defending Democracy Taskforce which I very much value, being security vetted and so on. The noble Lord is right that some of these behaviours seem to be part of a larger-scale espionage campaign and it is disturbing that China is targeting bulk data. It seems to be part of the strategic objectives. We have been clear that it is unacceptable. I do not know exactly what conclusion to draw from that at this time, but we are obviously keeping these matters under review.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Monday 11th September 2023 Lords Chamber

To further reassure noble Lords, as far as I am aware no supplier to the UK public sector has been involved in forced organ harvesting—though if they were, the exclusion grounds would apply. Although I sympathise with the noble Lord’s concern—he has been very eloquent in this area in successive debates on the Bill—I am not convinced of the case for this amendment. I hope that, in the light of what has been said, he may decide not to press this amendment today, bearing in mind all that I have said about our approach to this abhorrent practice. I beg to move.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the Minister. I will come back to that in a few moments, because she has been extraordinarily helpful, and I know we have made significant progress from when the first amendment was moved on this issue.

In parenthesis, before I begin—and because I will not weary the House with a second speech later, even if the opportunity is there—I would like to say how much I support what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of King’s Heath, is trying to achieve with Motion 102A and Amendment 102B. Again, I have spoken on those previously, along with the noble Baronesses, Lady Northover and Lady Brinton, the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, from the Conservative Benches, my noble friend Lady Finlay—who is unable to be with us this evening—and many others who want to support what the noble Lord is trying to achieve.

I turn to Clause 65 and Amendment 47B in Motion 47A in my name. As the Minister said, it would require a timeline for the removal of surveillance equipment that is connected to the internet and subject to the People’s Republic of China’s national intelligence law. I did say that I would like to start my remarks, and I do, by paying tribute to the Minister’s own efforts and those of her officials, who have met with me now on several occasions—most recently on Thursday last—to discuss the concerns of Members of both Houses when it comes to the presence of Chinese-made surveillance cameras in our public procurement chain.

As recently as yesterday, the Sunday Telegraph reported that the Co-op has decided to ban Chinese CCTV for “ethical and security reasons”. Given the Minister’s professional background in a previous life, she will know that, in doing this, it is following the example of Tesco. It would indeed be odd if supermarkets were ahead of public bodies in recognising the dangers posed by the CCP’s surveillance state. I was also very struck that the Deputy Prime Minister, the right honourable Oliver Dowden, speaking in another place this afternoon about allegations concerning espionage on the estate of your Lordships’ House and that of another place, made a point of saying that one of his first actions in Whitehall had been to have surveillance cameras linked to Hikvision removed from his department. This is something that Sajid Javid also said when he became Secretary of State for Health. I simply say that, if supermarkets and departments of state are not suitable places for these cameras, where is? It would indeed be odd if we did not think about the 60% of public bodies that are estimated to have Hikvision cameras in use.

This is not a new question that I am putting to your Lordships’ House; this is something I have raised on over 40 occasions in the House or in Grand Committee since 2020. Both the Minister and the Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord True, have taken this issue seriously. When the noble Lord was in charge of this Bill, in its earliest stages, we had a meeting to discuss Hikvision. Because I want to get on with seeing a resolution of this issue, I am able to welcome the clear commitment from the Minister, given at the Dispatch Box, for a timetable for the removal of this surveillance equipment and these cameras from sensitive sites. However, it is worth noting, as I have said, how we got here.

As the Government have recognised, there are at least a million Hikvision and Dahua cameras in the UK, installed across our high streets, job centres, schools, police forces, hospitals, universities, local government buildings and even government departments. I gently say to the Minister that, although she is right that military barracks or GCHQ are clearly far more sensitive sites than, say, hospitals or schools, some of this is about data collection. That involves every single citizen of this country, so it poses dangers for them too. I commend to her the recent Channel 4 documentary on Hikvision and the fantastic work of IPVM, Big Brother Watch, Hong Kong Watch—of which I am a patron—and other organisations that have outlined the security risk that these cameras pose, particularly in those sensitive public sector sites, but not exclusively so.

It is quite something to consider that, as a country, we have willingly handed over the majority of our surveillance infrastructure, which watches the often public and sometimes intimately private moments of our lives, not just to the police or local authorities but to an authoritarian Government that the House of Commons has found, on a resolution of the House, credibly accused of genocide. I declare a non-financial interest as vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uyghurs.

How ironic it is that we are debating this on the day we have learned that an alleged CCP spy has been operating across Parliament, based in the office of a Member of another place. We urgently need a bicameral group of senior parliamentarians to investigate this shocking lapse. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament has warned against the infiltration of our universities and other institutions. Only last week, the University of Cambridge ended a partnership with a subsidiary company developing Chinese weapons and military hardware. The line between crass naivety and outright collaboration is a fine one. We recall the Cambridge spies and the Soviet Union, and some of the disastrous consequences. It should send a shiver down the spine of every freedom-loving person to see swathes of the public surveillance procurement supply chain handed over to Chinese companies that are blacklisted for complicity in gross human rights violations by the United States and which are legally compelled under the PRC national intelligence law to pass on data to the Chinese Communist Party state.

As we debate the timeline for their removal from our public procurement supply chain, the definition of what we should consider “sensitive sites” and the oversight that Members of this House and another place will have should be high on our agenda. Surely, for too long government policy towards China has favoured investment and trade at the expense of our national security, our values and human rights. We have underestimated the PRC, ignored the voices of those Uighurs, Hong Kongers, Tibetans and others who have been persecuted by the CCP and know it best, and failed to produce a coherent strategy to deal with the threat that the PRC poses. I am always struck by the phrase used by the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, who knows a thing or two about China. He describes it as cakeism—wanting to have your cake and eat it—to want trade deals on the one hand, but recognise the country as a threat to your national interest on the other.

Covid-19 Inquiry

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 8th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

As I explained, ever since the inquiry was agreed, the Government have been helping it to ensure that, as is the precedent of other inquiries, the key documents are made available and appropriate witness statements are prepared. We have extended that process to wider material at its request, to reflect modern communications. The terms of reference were wide and a lot of discretion was left to the chair. The Government are keen to see the inquiry’s conclusions and findings as soon as possible. It is being phased by modules, and we look forward to hearing the chair’s conclusions.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister assure the House that key documents will include information to the inquiry on the role of procurement, including concerns raised about transparency by the National Audit Office? It does not take an inquiry for the Minister to establish from her noble friends when the issue of the 118 million items still stored in the People’s Republic of China, costing this country £250,000 every day, will be resolved. If she cannot answer that now, will she agree to write?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Arrangements for procurement are very much at the heart of some of the issues in the inquiry, as I remember we discussed here on many occasions with the noble Lord. Of course, this was covered by the terms of reference; I look forward to hearing the conclusions just as much as he does.

Security of Government Devices

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, given the Minister’s previous professional connections with Tesco, she will have noticed that, last weekend, it announced that it will remove Hikvision cameras from its supermarkets—many of us applaud that decision. The Minister will also recall that, when the Procurement Bill left this place, it included an all-party amendment on Hikvision and surveillance cameras. Why did the Government then remove that amendment in Committee in another place? Will they support Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former leader of the Conservative Party, in his attempts, and those of others from across the political divide in the House of Commons, to reinstate that amendment on Report? If not, does that not make everything that has been said to us in the House today contradictory?

I also ask the Minister to look at the evidence of Professor Fraser Sampson, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, which he gave to the Joint Committee on Human Rights at the beginning of this month. In answer to a question I asked, he said directly that, because of the facial recognition techniques that can be used, not just by these cameras but by many other pieces of technology, this poses a risk to personal privacy and is therefore liable to be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. Will the Minister please look at what was said to the Joint Committee?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, as a former executive of Tesco, obviously I was extremely interested to see this at the top of my in-tray, where other things it does often appear. On Chinese cameras, I have not seen the evidence to which the noble Lord refers, but I would be very interested to see it. But I assure him that discussions on the Procurement Bill continue in the other place, and my noble friend the Paymaster-General has been in discussions with Sir Iain Duncan Smith on this and other issues. Of course, the Procurement Bill will come back to this House in due course, and I look forward to engaging further with the noble Lord.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

3rd reading
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, as the Minister pointed out, this is a really important Bill. It will guide an estimated £300 billion of public procurement, hopefully making it safe while driving some of the things we want to happen. I thank the Minister. She had an interesting start on this Bill; she too was a Back-Bencher and tabled several critical amendments early on, and was then suddenly propelled to the Front Bench. I think we benefited from that change of perspective—that is not to criticise her predecessor.

It is appropriate that we should bookend this Bill with another amendment, because it has been a story of amendments. We should thank the Bill team, who worked through the night at the start of this in Committee in July, explaining and setting out what the hundreds of amendments were there to do. But because there were so many amendments and clearly there was so much work to do, the Bill leaves us with still more work and scrutiny required, if it is going to achieve the things that we all want it to achieve—that is, to have a transparent process that helps our small, medium and social enterprises to flourish in the public procurement system. When it goes to the other place, I hope that those further changes can be made to make sure that it delivers that, and in an ethical way.

I thank the Minister, her predecessor and her Whips in this. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, for what has been a very constructive and co-operative process. I also thank my colleagues. I will name them, because they have worked very hard: my noble friends Lady Brinton, Lady Humphreys, Lady Northover, Lady Parminter, Lord Purvis, Lord Scriven, Lady Smith, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Wallace. That list reflects the fact that the Bill touches so much of public life. Finally, I thank Elizabeth Plummer in our Whips’ office, without whom life would have been extraordinarily confusing for us on these Benches. That said, we wish the Bill well and beg that the MPs continue to work on it on our behalf.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I have something to add before the thanks are completed. The Minister was good enough to express her thanks to the Cross Benches, and I draw the attention of the House to the all-party amendments which were included in the Bill. I begin by thanking her. As the noble Lord, Lord Fox, just said, it was unusual for a poacher to be turned gamekeeper in the course of the proceedings of the Bill and she did it with great aplomb and showed all the characteristics that we have come to associate with her, in the way that she dealt with constructive attempts to improve the Bill as it proceeded through Committee and Report.

As the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said, the Bill has enjoyed support from around the entire House and, of course, whatever form a Bill is in, we will all always want to try to add to it, if we are able to do so. I was therefore very grateful to the House for including the cross-party amendment I moved on the removal of surveillance equipment. I also supported the all-party amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, who is here, on the use of forced organ harvesting. Those two amendments are now in the Bill as it goes to another place. Unlike on ping-pong, this is a pristine Bill going to the other place. I hope that Ministers will engage with those amendments and not simply try to remove them.

There were two other amendments. The Minister will recall that the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, moved an all-party amendment which was not taken to a vote. We had a discussion during Report about how that could be taken to the Minister who might deal with the Bill when it reached the House of Commons. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, will be able to draw that to the attention of the House of Commons Minister and suggest that such a meeting should now take place.

With those remarks, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and his noble friends, but also the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and her noble friends—the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in particular—and those on the Cross Benches who supported the amendments that we brought forward.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I think I am the sole surviving Member of the Committee here today who contributed. I congratulate my noble friend the Minister and the Bill team on getting the Bill thus far. I am obviously immensely disappointed not to have succeeded in my attempt to source more local food in our procurement contracts, but I hope that this can be redressed in the other place.

My noble friend alluded to something that is a source of great concern to me. I have in my possession the memorandum from the Scottish Government, which expressed their concern and inability to add their consent to the Bill. Does she not share my concern that it would be very regrettable if the Scottish Government felt obliged to carry out their own Bill in this area, because of their concern about the continued ability to carry out cross-border procurement? Could this still be addressed in the other place before the Bill reaches Royal Assent?

Procurement Bill [HL]

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 30th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly on Amendment 97, which the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, has just introduced, concerning the procurement review unit. I am grateful to the Minister for organising a very helpful meeting recently outlining the Government’s thinking on the role of the PRU. This is not envisaged as a statutory body, so does not currently feature in the Bill, but it will have some important functions relating to SME engagement in public procurement, such as fostering much-needed culture change in the construction sector and promoting SME access through means such as training, transparency and, above all, better payment practices for public contracts.

These include making 30-day payment terms apply throughout the public sector supply chain, with the 30-day period measured from when an invoice is first received rather than when it is deemed valid. Contracting authorities will be required to publish their payment performance every six months. The payment performance review scheme, PPRS, run by the Cabinet Office, which has been underresourced in the past, will be given extra capacity, staffing and weight. The current system, based on reporting the volume of invoices paid within 30 days, can allow late payment of large sums to be drowned out by a high volume of lower-value instant payments. To give a truer picture, I hope the Minister might consider requiring the value of payments made within 30 days to be reported, as well as the volume.

The PRU will also carry out proactive spot checks to assess compliance with payment terms throughout the supply chain. The Minister might explore the possibility of using technology to track payment times, which might ultimately lead to more real-time transparency of payment performance. I understand that many construction firms already use technology to produce their payment reports.

These are all very welcome aspects of the Government’s plans for the procurement review unit. I hope the Minister will put them formally on record in her response, thereby averting, or at least reducing, the need for Amendment 97 to include the PRU in the Bill.

I end by congratulating the Minister on her piece in the Times on Monday confirming her commitment to making it easier for small firms to compete for and win public sector contracts. I hope the Times readership will actively support us in holding her and the Government to that commitment.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I can be brief. I thoroughly support everything that the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, said to us in moving his amendment. I do not need to repeat arguments that I placed before your Lordships earlier this week on Monday, in December last year, and then again in January and March this year, and even in the Question that we had just before our proceedings on PPE, which continues to be stored in the People’s Republic of China at a cost to us of some £770,000 every day.

I am extremely grateful that the Minister responded so quickly after our debate on Monday with a letter that I received this morning. For the purposes of the record, I will read out one paragraph. She wrote:

“You made a number of points about PPE contracts which have been found to have underperformed. I also understand you have asked written questions … on these matters. I appreciate your desire for more information on this and I will be writing to the Secretary of State highlighting both your views and those expressed by others in the House.”


That is a very welcome response and I am grateful to the noble Baroness for going to that trouble.

I have sent a copy of our Hansard from Monday to my noble and learned friend Lady Hallett, who is chairing the public inquiry to which the Minister referred during our debate on Monday. The Minister said that lessons would be learned, and that the Covid inquiry would

“cover procurement and the distribution of key equipment and supplies, including PPE”.—[Official Report, 28/11/22; col. 1593.]

I am grateful to her for that.

I have only one other point. On Monday, I raised the issue of repayments. That is not something that can wait for the several years it might take the public inquiry to make its recommendations. I refer the Minister to my two questions about defaulting PPE suppliers and the actions that will be taken through the faulty contract PPE recovery unit. I also asked about individual settlements, which, as she said, are protected by commercial secrecy. I asked

“how will Parliament and the public be notified about money returned to public funds by defaulting PPE suppliers through the actions of the faulty contract PPE recovery unit?”—[Official Report, 28/11/22; col. 1581.]

How will that work? Can the Minister illuminate us a little further? If she cannot, would she be prepared to put pen to paper in a follow-up letter to me as a result of today’s debate? I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, for giving us the opportunity to explore this issue further.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, who raised such important points about payment terms for small and medium-sized enterprises. That is a long- term issue that has not been addressed. There is a real opportunity here, as the noble Lord outlined.

I will speak briefly to Amendment 72, in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, who so comprehensively introduced it, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I confess that I attached my name to it at the absolute last minute because I expected a rush of Members from around your Lordships’ House doing so. I thought it was important to demonstrate that there was a breadth of support.

I should perhaps warn the Minister that that support appeared to come from the Government Front Bench earlier, when the noble Lord, Lord Markham, responding to the PPE Urgent Question repeat from the other place, said that the earlier procurement

“should not have been on the basis of referrals”.

It would appear that this amendment delivers exactly what the noble Lord said should happen in future. That is a very interesting reflection of what is happening in your Lordships’ House.

Briefly, we know that the Government would like to treat all this as ancient history, but I and, I am sure, other Members of your Lordships’ House have seen that for members of the public this is still a source of very deep anger and concern. This morning I was on Radio 5 Live’s politicians’ panel and a caller raised this issue, albeit in the context of Matt Hancock’s appearance on “I’m a Celebrity”.

There were a couple of powerful letters in the Guardian this week. I do not know either of the correspondents. Dr Tristram Wyatt noted that in 1919, after the First World War, the President of the Board of Trade introduced a profiteering Bill to ensure that profiteering by suppliers would never happen again. In the same paper Dr Jeremy Oliver questioned why all these PPE contracts were not let on a full cost plus margin basis. This is of great concern to the public. I am hearing from all quarters again and again that people are simply saying, “Never again.” What happened in the Covid-19 pandemic with the VIP channel must not be allowed to happen again. This clear, simple amendment delivers just that.

I will also briefly express concern about government Amendment 116. We had an extensive discussion about this in Committee, which I will not revisit, but this appears to be a significant weakening of the protection of public concern about potential conflicts of interest. I look forward to the Minister’s explanation of that.

--- Later in debate ---

Last year, the House agreed an amendment to the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill to include consent provisions for imported human tissue for use in medicines. Earlier this year, we amended the Health and Care Bill to prohibit the commercialism of organ tourism. They may be small steps, but internationally they were regarded as a visible sign of this country’s concern and as significant. I hope that tonight the House will go one step further. A discretionary power is a modest ask of the Minister. I really hope that we can take one small step towards ending these abhorrent practices. I beg to move.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, as in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has made a very eloquent, powerful and compelling case for supporting this modest Amendment 91. I am happy to be a signatory to this amendment again.

In Committee, the noble Lord and I, with the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, asked the Government about a hospital being built in China in connection with a British company. I thank the Minister for the parliamentary reply about that hospital, which she gave me on 29 November. But I am concerned to learn that the company involved, International Hospitals Group, has a continuing hospital partnership in the People’s Republic of China.

I draw the House’s attention to the words of the British Medical Association, which describes China as a country where there is

“evidence of medical involvement in the Chinese state’s genocide against Uyghur people”,

and the statement of the China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, which describes the “significant scale” of enforced organ harvesting throughout China, all of which should surely encourage us to think very seriously about what more we can do, as we did on the Health and Care Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said. All of us who heard the arguments then went into the Lobbies to support him, and I hope that if it becomes necessary—which I hope it will not—we will do the same tonight.

I am also a signatory to Amendment 141, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud. This is an argument, again, that we have had in previous legislation—again in the health Bill—about the use of slave labour in Xinjiang. I draw attention to my being vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uyghurs. It is an issue that I have raised again and again, and mentioned here again during debates on this Bill on Monday last. I will not try to curtain-raise for the noble Baroness—she is more than capable of doing that for herself.

My purpose, therefore, in rising, is to specifically draw attention to and speak to the cross-party Amendment 94, which is in my name and, not for the first time, in the name of my noble friend Lord Blencathra —to use a phrase the Minister used earlier on. I do so because the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is my noble friend in so many respects, and we have joined common forces. Old Chief Whips should stand together on such matters, and I am always pleased to be in the same Lobby as the noble Lord. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, who has been so formidable, and the noble Lord, Lord Fox, who again has been formidable on these issues throughout, are also signatories to this amendment.

The amendment would require the Government to set out a timetable. In a way, we have already been given half a cake, and I want again to be grateful to the noble Baroness. She was able to say to me that she accepts the substance of our case, but what she has not been able to accept—I hope we will convince her to do so this evening—is that there should be a timetable determining when we will prevent further surveillance cameras entering the United Kingdom and being placed often in very sensitive positions, as I will describe. This amendment would remove them from the Government’s procurement supply chain where there is established evidence that the supplier has been involved in modern slavery, genocide or crimes against humanity.

It is particularly topical, as we read reports today of the use of surveillance technology in arresting, imprisoning and re-educating protesters caught up in the wave of unrest in China. There are reports in British and American newspapers today about how surveillance technology—some of the very things we are debating in this amendment—has been used to arrest young people, who then have the whole of their personal histories seen through the devices that they own. Some of their friends have been arrested as a result of access to that information and been arraigned in police stations.

As a result of the hangover from the Government’s so-called “golden era” of relations with the PRC, which the Prime Minister said in his Mansion House speech on Monday was over, we have allowed our surveillance and technology supply chain to be dominated by Chinese surveillance companies with credible links to the genocide taking place in the Uighur region. I am not using that word in a rhetorical way. It was a word used by the former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, Liz Truss; it was her word that “genocide” was under way in Xinjiang. It is a word that Secretary of State Blinken has used in describing events there, and many others have, too.

Both Hikvision and Dahua Technology, two of the companies in question, have been blacklisted in the USA for their links to the internment camps in Xinjiang and their role working hand-in-glove with the CCP to construct the largest authoritarian surveillance state, which has surpassed even George Orwell’s wildest dreams. There is little distinction between these Chinese technology companies and the state that they serve. They not only work on behalf of the PRC but receive generous state subsidies to do so, which allows them to undercut their rivals and dominate the domestic UK market.

It is therefore little surprise that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has attacked any notion of the United Kingdom Government banning the use of Hikvision and Dahua cameras as “unreasonable suppression” of Chinese companies. I appreciate the engagement from Ministers on this topic, from the noble Baroness but also the noble Lord, Lord True, who met with me privately on this matter on a couple of occasions. During one of those meetings, we were told that there are now 1 million—I repeat, 1 million—Hikvision cameras in the United Kingdom alone.

The announcement last week, then, by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster that the Government are following the example of the Department of Health and Social Care in banning Hikvision cameras from sensitive areas and removing existing cameras from the network, which mirrors the action from the US that I have just referred to, and has just finalised a permanent ban on the sale and import of Hikvision and Dahua Technology cameras, is a welcome one. This is an issue which the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and I have raised on the Floor of the House in regret Motions, in months gone by and in previous debates.

Now that the Government have finally recognised the security and human rights concerns of having Hikvision and Dahua cameras in government departments, the question arises: will they commit to a plan for their removal from the public sector supply chain in its entirety? That is what the amendment is about. As the Government will note, successive freedom of information requests from IPVM, Big Brother Watch and Free Tibet, and Parliamentary Questions, have revealed that Hikvision and Dahua are deeply entrenched in our public sector supply chain. Local councils, NHS trusts, schools, prisons, jobcentres and our railway network all have Hikvision and Dahua cameras in their supply chain and their physical infrastructure.

Do we really want the prying eyes of an authoritarian state that has been accused of genocide, and which, as the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, said just last month, is the

“biggest state based threat to our economic security”,

in our schools, hospitals, and local council buildings? Similarly, how can the Government justify public contracts and taxpayers’ money going into companies where there are credible links of complicity in genocide and the internment camps in Xinjiang? This requires more than “robust pragmatism”, whatever that may mean.

The Government urgently need to come forward with a strategy to remove Hikvision and Dahua Technology cameras from the whole of the procurement supply chain. In the words of the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, Fraser Sampson, whom I met last month, these cameras are built on “digital asbestos”. We need a serious government-led plan for their removal. That might take several years. It is the same issue that we had to face with Huawei. We should also develop technology to mitigate the risks these cameras pose in the meantime. We can do that by looking at issues such as connectivity through software, which Canadians are developing at the present time, which might not require the physical removal of all cameras.

Such a plan could emulate a similar timetable that Ministers set out in the then Telecoms (Security) Bill—to which I moved amendments—for the removal of Huawei from the UK’s 5G network. This would include setting a hard date to phase out and remove Hikvision and Dahua technology and hardware from the procurement supply chain; looking at provision and support that can be offered to cash-strapped local authorities to help with the removal; and considering following the USA in banning the sale and import of these cameras in the United Kingdom.

I welcome the leadership that Ministers have shown recently in banning the use of Hikvision and Dahua cameras in government departments, but I urge them to consider applying that same leadership to the rest of the procurement supply chain. The Government are no longer saying that they are unaware of the security and ethical concerns of using these cameras and they cannot wish away the existence of these cameras in the wider procurement supply chain. We need an urgent timetable and a plan to remove Hikvision and Dahua from the UK supply chain in its entirety. I hope the Minister will further consider accepting the entirety of this amendment so that such a timetable and plan will be put in place.

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 141, which is in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Alton and Lord Coaker, and of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, demonstrating cross-party support for it. I add my support to the other amendments in this group.

I also underline my gratitude to the Government and my noble friend the Minister for seriously engaging with the amendment over the summer. I know that we share a desire to mitigate the two key risk areas in public procurement that the amendment covers: first, the possible UK dependency on authoritarian states; and, secondly, the risk of modern slavery in government supply chains. I covered these areas in Committee, so I will keep my comments brief and seek to address any concerns that my noble friend might have raised.

To recap, proposed new subsection (1) would place a burden on the Secretary of State to create regulations that reduce public bodies’ dependency on authoritarian states. As we know, there is no agreed definition of what constitutes an “authoritarian state” in UK law or regulation. Therefore, proposed new subsection (2) would adopt the categorisation contained in the integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy, allowing the legislation to adapt to contemporary geopolitical developments in line with the latest iteration of the review. The countries the amendment would currently apply to as “threats” are Iran, Russia and North Korea, and, as a “systemic competitor”, China. As we have heard, this perspective on China was reiterated by the Prime Minister only this week.

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I turn now to Amendment 95 on product labelling; there has not been much discussion of it.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, if it is helpful to the noble Baroness, I say that, because of the time and because we did have a preliminary debate about this in Committee, it would not be my intention to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 95. I am quite happy for her to write to me with any remarks that she might have liked to have made.

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[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

Before the noble Baroness leaves that point, it is important to put on the record that we currently have a trade deficit with the People’s Republic of China of £40 billion. Dependency, resilience, and the destruction of our own manufacturing base because we are outcompeted through the use of slave labour and goods that are priced much more cheaply than people on a living wage can produce in the United Kingdom—these are issues that the Government need to take rather more seriously than she has just done.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I do take these issues seriously and I commented on diversification, which I have personally been involved in. It is because there is a large amount of trade with China that this cannot be changed overnight—and there might not be a case to do so in non-strategic areas. Inflation is very important and the opening up of Asia has historically been helpful in this country. The Prime Minister said in his speech that we must be realistic and clear about China, but that obviously does not mean we should abandon our values.

It goes without saying that practices such as slavery and human trafficking have no place in government supply chains. We have shown our determination to address modern slavery in many ways, including in the Bill. I draw my noble friend’s attention to the fact that under Clause 27, contracting authorities must ask suppliers to provide details of their intended supply chain for the contract. Authorities can consider whether a subcontractor is subject to a ground for exclusion such as modern slavery. If they conclude that this is the case and that it has failed to self-clean, the lead supplier itself is liable to be excluded from the procurement if it does not take the opportunity to remove the subcontractor from its supply chain. However, we must recognise the complexity of the issue.

My noble friend’s amendment says that

“The Secretary of State must … make provision”


in procurements and contracts to eradicate slavery and human trafficking, and that this is to be done by secondary legislation, but I fear that the amendment fails to reflect the sheer complexity of the matter. Regulations cannot specify precisely which award criteria might be appropriate to address the risk of slavery and human trafficking in every different procurement: this depends on the nature of the particular contract being tendered, including what is being purchased and the likely nature and location of supply chains. The right vehicle to help contracting authorities address slavery and human trafficking risks is in guidance, and there is already comprehensive guidance setting out the action that departments must take. This is 46 pages long and includes sections on managing risks in new procurements, assessing existing contracts, taking action when victims of modern slavery are identified, supply chain mapping, useful tools, training and questions to ask.

My noble friend will know that I have committed to put the matters addressed in the guidance on a statutory footing as part of the national procurement policy statement, provided for under Clause 12 of the Bill. This would mean that all contracted authorities would have to have regard to that guidance, which I think the noble Baroness can see is a significant step forward.

Finally, I note that the draft provisions in the amendment go significantly beyond the language in the Health and Care Act with which it was my noble friend’s stated intention to bring the Bill into alignment. Amendment 141 also creates a strong expectation that the Minister will make regulations, and that they will cover the matters referred to in the amendment, so it is effectively a must.

I know that people are looking forward to getting to the end of this debate, so I will not go through the problems with proposed new subsection (5)(d) to (f), but I will ask noble Lords to note that this will be burdensome to contracting authorities as well as small businesses. I know that my noble friend does not much care about the latter, but there might be wider concern about the gumming-up of contracting authorities in this matter when we have already made arrangements in the Bill to give modern slavery much more focus, and have added that to the relevant schedules.

We believe that proposed new subsection (5)(f), for example, is disproportionate and contrary to the open principles of our procurement regime, as well as to the interests of efficiency, value for money and common sense. Moreover, countries and regions that pose risks change over time, and that is another reason to use guidance, and not this Bill, on this matter.

Finally, I say to my noble friend Lord Blencathra that we should remember that the new regime will give broader exclusion powers to contracting authorities—he referenced Huawei—which will have primary responsibility for applying the exclusions regime.

In closing, I respectfully ask the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, to withdraw his amendment, but I emphasise the progress that this Bill has made, and I therefore find some of the comments on this group a little disappointing.

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Moved by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

94: After Clause 61, insert the following new Clause—
“Timeline for removal of suppliers
(1) Within 6 months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must publish a timeline for the removal of physical technology or surveillance equipment from the Government’s procurement supply chain where the Secretary of State is satisfied there is established evidence that a provider has been involved in—(a) modern slavery,(b) genocide, or(c) crimes against humanity.(2) The Secretary of State must lay the timeline before Parliament.”

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to test the opinion of the House.

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Members of both Houses all support the greatest possible transparency and recognise that we need to change the culture in all three armed services from one that says, “We have to have equipment that is at least as complex and of at least as high a standard as that of the US” to one that says, “For the many things we need, more things that are slightly less complex and a hell of a lot cheaper would probably be better”. So I ask for more transparency—that is where the audit comes from. We are actively concerned about supporting our Armed Forces, but we recognise that the implications of what we have seen between Ukraine and Russia give rise to large questions about the future balance of defence procurement that we have to address.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, is right to remind us not just of events in Victorian Britain but of what is happening at the moment and the impact that events in Ukraine and elsewhere will have on our procurement programmes.

I serve on your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee. As the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie—it is wonderful to see her in her place—knows, throughout the whole of this year we have been conducting an inquiry into procurement and defence priorities, which the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, touched on. We began it before the second invasion of Ukraine in February. From my discussions with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, who pressed this issue in Committee, I know how important this is, for all the reasons he described. He has a great sense of patriotism and cares for our Armed Forces, and I strongly associate myself with him and the desire for a probing amendment to test some of these questions.

One reason why I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, will be able to reply in terms to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, on Ajax especially, is that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, who is chair of our Select Committee, was here during his speech—she was unable to stay—and said that I can tell the House that she strongly agrees with the questions he put. She hopes that the noble Baroness will be able to answer them because they will be part of the terms of our committee’s report, which we have to complete before the House rises for the Christmas Recess at the end of December. So it is important that, if the noble Baroness is not able to answer those probing questions this evening, we are given answers in due course.

One of the witnesses to the Select Committee inquiry was Professor John Louth, who was the director of defence, industries and society research at RUSI from 2011 to 2019. When we asked him directly about the way in which we should go about defence procurement, I asked him specifically about the Bill and whether it would be welcome. He said:

“I have tried to read as much of this as possible … It is hard to identify the end state that the Government are looking for”.


He said that there are

“lines and lines of rhetoric and legalistic reform”,

some of which is incomprehensible even for those of us who are academics.

I asked him specifically about Ajax, which the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has been raising, and he replied that it has been a “disaster”. As we have heard, it was intended to be a state-of-the-art reconnaissance vehicle for the Army, and it has cost a staggering £3.2 billion to date, yet so far not a single deployable vehicle has been delivered—not one. It was of course supposed to enter service in 2017, but it has been subject to what the Commons committee called a “litany of failures”, including noise and vibration problems that injured the soldiers testing the vehicles. Can the Minister tell us whether those safety issues have been resolved, or whether they are ever likely to be?

The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, reminded us that the House of Lords Select Committee said the programme had been “flawed from the outset” and also that it was illustrative of a deeper failing, commenting that the Ministry of Defence

“once again made fundamental mistakes in its planning and management of a major defence programme.”

Pulling no punches, the Public Accounts Committee accused the department of failing to deliver vehicles which the Armed Forces need

“to better protect the nation and to meet our NATO commitments”.

In the current situation, with one eye eastwards to Ukraine, that is a very serious statement by a senior committee of Parliament—and this Bill, of course, is a Bill that will go down to the other place. It will go as a pristine Bill from the House of Lords, but the other place will be able to amend it, and I have no doubt that people from the Public Accounts Committee will want the answers that the noble Lord has gently been asking for this evening.

I will end by quoting Meg Hillier, who chaired the committee inquiry. She said:

“Enough is enough—the MoD must fix or fail this programme, before more risk to our national security and more billions of taxpayers’ money is wasted. These repeated failures … are putting strain on older capabilities which are overdue for replacement and are directly threatening the safety of our service people and their ability to protect the nation and meet NATO commitments.”


That is good enough reason alone, surely, for the Minister to give the House a comprehensive reply.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Baroness Goldie) (Con)]

My Lords, I first thank noble Lords for their contributions. I understand fully that the proposed amendment is well intended, and I accept it in that spirit. I think it has certain implicit difficulties, which I shall move on to. I would never object to the Opposition Benches holding the Government’s feet to the fire—that is what the Opposition are there to do—but I hope they will be patient with me as I seek to explain why the precise terms of the amendment confront the MoD with difficulty.

The proposed amendment would require the Ministry of Defence to commission and publish a report from the National Audit Office, setting out instances of procurement overspend, withdrawal or scrapping of assets, termination of prepaid services, cancellations or extensions of contracts, or administrative errors with negative financial impacts. The reason the MoD rejects the amendment is not because it is not in sympathy with what I have identified as a well-intended sentiment expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, but quite simply because existing processes already ensure robust scrutiny and accountability of Ministry of Defence procurements.

Before I move on to that more detailed exposition, let me deal with a very specific point the noble Lord raised about the defence equipment plan which was published yesterday. He is more ahead than I am because I have been preparing for this. I have referred it to my officials, and I am told that it is difficult to calculate an accurate figure of inflation at the moment, due to volatility. That is an inadequate response to give the noble Lord from the Dispatch Box, so I offer to write to him. We will do further research in the department, and I shall endeavour to expand on what these particular difficulties are.

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Tabled by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

141: After Clause 101, insert the following new Clause—
“Supply chain resilience against economic coercion and slavery
(1) The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision for reducing the dependency of public bodies upon goods and services which originate in whole or in part in a country considered by the United Kingdom as either a systemic competitor or a threat.(2) A country is “considered by the United Kingdom as either a systemic competitor or a threat” if it was defined as such in the latest Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy.(3) The regulations under subsection (1) may, in particular, include—(a) provision for an annual review of the dependency of public bodies upon countries which are considered by the United Kingdom as systemic competitors or threats;(b) provision for the setting of acceptable dependency thresholds across all categories of public procurement.(4) The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision for eradicating from all public contracts goods or services that are tainted by slavery and human trafficking.(5) The regulations under subsection (4) may, in particular, include—(a) provision in connection with the processes to be followed by public bodies in the procurement of goods or services for the purposes of public contracts; (b) provision as to steps that must be taken by public bodies for assessing and addressing the risk of slavery and human trafficking taking place in relation to people involved in public bodies’ supply chains;(c) provision as to matters for which provision must be made in contracts for goods or services entered into by public bodies;(d) provision as to the standards of disclosure and transparency required for all contractors or prospective contractors, which must, at a minimum, include publication and verification of information about the country of origin of all sourcing inputs in their supply chain;(e) provision for the public disclosure of the names of contractors or prospective contractors whose supply chains are considered tainted by slavery and human trafficking;(f) provision for the publication and dissemination of a risk register detailing areas from which goods cannot be sourced without unreasonable risk of slavery and human trafficking being present in supply chains.(6) In this section—“public body” means a body exercising functions of a public nature;“slavery and human trafficking” has the meaning given by section 54(12) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015;goods or services are “tainted” by slavery and human trafficking if slavery and human trafficking take place in relation to anyone involved in the supply chain for providing those goods or services.”Member’s explanatory statement
The amendment seeks to improve the UK’s supply chain resilience against dependency and human rights abuse by creating a double regulation making power: to enable the Government to develop a plan to address dependency throughout public procurement; and to bring the human rights standards of wider public procurement in line with the procurement standards of the Department of Health and Social Care.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

With the leave of the House, I shall speak for a moment on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, and as one of the four sponsors of the amendment, to say how encouraged we were by the offer made earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for a meeting with the sponsors of the amendment. Given that this Bill is not in ping-pong but will be going to another place for further consideration, it is now the intention of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, not to move the amendment and to return to this question once we have had the opportunity of meeting the Minister and, in due course, returning to the issues we explored during the debate this evening.

Amendment 141 not moved.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 28th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendments 3 and 17 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. In so doing, I echo what she said about how this Bill is better than the place we started from. Having spoken at Second Reading and in Committee and attended the meeting that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, kindly organised so that we could learn more about the intricacies and granular detail of the Bill, I commend the Government for what they are trying to do. Although, I will give some painful examples to the House in support of what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, just said, I totally exempt the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord True, with whom I had a number of meetings in the run-up to the presentation of this Bill in the House. They have both been exemplary as Ministers.

The noble Baroness and I have been in correspondence over the weekend about some of the points I am about to raise. The reforms outlined by the Government are based on what I think are laudable principles of public procurement set out in the Green Paper. They are value for money, public good, transparency, integrity, equal treatment and non-discrimination. I urge noble Lords to keep them in mind as I proceed through my remarks.

Ministers have told us that streamlined new procedures will mean better commercial outcomes that deliver more value for money for taxpayers. This amendment would ensure that those public interest principles also extend to the National Health Service, as I believe they should. The NHS should not be regarded as a side issue or of little consequence, as it were. It should be within the same remit. In the year before Covid—2018-19—the DHSC spent around £70 billion on procurement in England, up from £68.3 billion in the previous year. Spending on health is far and away the most significant area of government procurement spending. It is more than three times defence spending. Around £18 billion is spent on medicine and, coming to a point that the noble Baroness made in her remarks a few moments ago, nearly £6 billion per year is spent on hospital consumables, which include gloves and syringes.

During Covid, vast sums were spent on procuring PPE. I have made a point regularly in your Lordships’ House, as other noble Lords have done, particularly from the Opposition Front Bench, about the kind of PPE that we have been buying from overseas, especially from the People’s Republic of China. The House of Commons Library, in a note published earlier this year, said that current estimates of the total cost of Covid to the Government range from about £310 billion to £410 billion, the equivalent of about £4,600 to about £6,100 per person in the United Kingdom. The portion of this spent by the Department of Health was put at £75.3 billion. Gross spending on public sector procurement increased by £53 billion, or 17%, between 2019 and 2021. Most of this increase was due to a £43 billion increase in health spending—a rise of 44%—and it is estimated that contracts for £14.6 billion were awarded for PPE.

I understand the argument that the Government have made on a number of occasions about the urgency of the public health crisis and that many public procurement procedures were expedited. In some cases, those procedures resulted in suppliers being chosen without the contract being put out to tender or otherwise advertised. I hope that part of the purpose of the Bill is that we have better procedures in place should another pandemic occur. Concern about how this was done led to a debate in the Commons on 21 June 2021 on a petition calling for a public inquiry into government contracts granted during Covid-19. Since the Minister will have seen the outrage in the Commons last week about profiteering from unusable PPE and widespread concern about politically connected companies benefiting from government contracts, I hope she will feel able today to respond to specific questions, some of which I asked in your Lordships’ House in January and March this year, during Committee and Report on the Health and Care Bill, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton referred. I refer the House to col. 635 on 1 January and col. 1032 on 3 March.

Even before that, on 13 December 2021, I asked

“whether any … person, or … organisation, will be censured for defaults involving the 47 VIP public contracts for facemasks and surgical gowns; and what steps they have taken in connection with defaults associated with their contract with PPE MedPro.”

I referred the House to a report in the Daily Telegraph which stated:

“Ministers handed almost £150m to Chinese firms with links to alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang amid a race to PPE after Covid hit.


The Health Department paid £122m to Winner Medical, which uses cotton produced by a supplier that works in the controversial region”.


That is in Xinjiang, where it is said that a million Muslims are incarcerated and where the former Prime Minister, Liz Truss, said that a genocide is under way. It continued:

“Another £19m contract went to pharmaceutical firm China Meheco and £16.5m was paid to Sinopharm, both of which have been linked to labour programmes in the province.”


In Committee I specifically asked about a Guardian report concerning Medpro, and on 19 January I was repeatedly told that details about PPE contracts are “considered commercially sensitive”. I have never been able to understand—this goes right to the heart of the noble Baroness’s amendment—why the Treasury could account for the £4.3 billion lost in fraud under the Covid support scheme but was unable to justify or identify the loss on PPE.

Even worse, I was told, “we have no plans to censure a single individual or organisation”. In January I asked why not, and I ask the same question again today. In January I was told that the Government are seeking to recover moneys paid to PPE Medpro in relation to a contract for the provision of gowns. It would be helpful for the House to know more about the remit of the public inquiry into Covid 19, chaired by my noble and learned friend Lady Hallett, and whether it will deal in detail with procurement under the terms of reference, especially in the sections dedicated to preparedness and our economic response.

Perhaps the noble Baroness could establish whether it will examine the concerns raised by the National Audit Office: first, the potential unequal treatment of suppliers in procurement processes; secondly, poor procurement practice due to procuring at speed—for example, retrospective contract awards, a lack of documentation on key procurement decisions and a lack of documentation on the management of potential conflicts of interest; and thirdly, lack of transparency over what contracts were awarded and how. We must not allow the concerns raised by the National Audit Office to happen all over again, and these amendments help us to do that.

But there are continuing challenges which need a response too. I was shocked to learn that we bought £1 billion-worth of lateral flow tests from the People’s Republic of China and spent around £10 billion of taxpayers’ money in the PRC on over 20 million items of PPE. Some 24.1 billion items have a country of origin recorded as China, including 10.7 billion gloves. This raises a lot of questions about dependency—lessons which you might have thought we had learned after Germany’s experiences with Putin—but it also raises questions about national resilience. Why could things such as this not have been manufactured here? Indeed, companies in this country that tried to get contracts, and which are capable of manufacturing these things, have told me that they could not even get into the competitive system because we suspended it. If nothing else, this begs a lot of questions about why such things could not be made in the UK.

I was also shocked to learn—I repeat this because I thought it almost unbelievable until I saw it revealed in a parliamentary reply in another place—that we have a further 120 million items of PPE that are still in China, and which it is costing taxpayers some £770 million each and every single day to keep there. I repeat: £770,000 each and every day to keep them—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

The millions and the thousands can multiply very rapidly in this debate. I apologise, but I think you get the point. It is over £20 million in the course of a year—£770,000 each and every single day.

I gave the noble Baroness notice of my intention to ask about this. Who authorised those acquisitions? Who decided that they should stay there? How much has it cost to date to store these items? How much has been budgeted to keep them in store at that cost of £770,000 every day, and for how long will they be stored? How much of the PPE that has been bought has proved to be defective and unusable? I would also like to know, first, how the Government intend to report the money returned to public funds by defaulting PPE suppliers through the actions of the faulty contract PPE recovery unit. Secondly, individual settlements are protected by commercial secrecy, so how will Parliament and the public be notified about money returned to public funds by defaulting PPE suppliers through the actions of the faulty contract PPE recovery unit? Thirdly, how do the Government intend to provide transparency and accountability in relation to money returned to public funds by defaulting PPE suppliers through the actions of the faulty contract PPE recovery unit?

It is clear that the NHS should be subject to far greater scrutiny, transparency and accountability. For all those reasons, I support Amendments 3 and 173 spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, which include the NHS in the definitions of a public authority for the purposes of the Bill.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Alton. When he speaks about the frailty of the NHS supply chain—I must declare my past presidency of the Health Care Supply Association—I am sure he is absolutely right to put these penetrating questions to the Minister.

I have two amendments in this group, Amendments 171 and 172, but I also want to speak to Amendments 3 and 173 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. She has rightly pointed to the potential confusion between two pieces of legislation in relation to the National Health Service and the procurement regime that it is to adopt in the future. The difficulty is compounded because, of course, we have not seen the draft regulations in relation to Clause 111, nor have we seen the draft regulations in relation to the amendment made in the Health and Care Act 2022 to the National Health Service Act 2006, after Section 12ZA. The 2022 Act gave huge powers to Ministers to establish their own procurement regime through regulations.

Clearly, there is every potential for confusion as to how these two sets of legislation are to work together, particularly if only NHS clinical services are to be covered by the disapplication in the Bill. That leaves a lot of questions for those working in the health and social care sectors as to how they are to operate the new processes. Given the nature of NHS commissioning and services, there are big questions about what happens if a contract incorporates clinical and non-clinical services. Under which set of regulations is procurement to be undertaken? Large hospital contracts—PFI contracts—often contain a mixture of clinical and non-clinical services, and the terms of the contract can sometimes last for 20 or more years.

Indeed, the more fundamental question is how we define “clinical services”. Some hospitals contract with private sector operators to provide, say, laboratory services the staff of which are employed by the private sector contractor. I would have called those clinical services; they are clearly directly related to clinical outcomes for patients. I am not at all sure how that is going to be covered by the two separate pieces of legislation. Of course, the NHS Confederation, which represents the bodies that operate the health service at the moment, including integrated care systems and NHS trusts, is obviously concerned about the confusion and potential distinction between the two sets of legislation.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I think I have been clear on the background to why it is different. I have also promised that regulations and guidance are being put together and will make very clear the differences: where the NHS rules need to apply and where the Procurement Bill needs to apply. That is the way in which these Bills have been constructed together. There are reasons. Especially on small NHS contracts involving social care, clinical services and so on, it clearly makes a great deal of sense to have a separate regime.

I am sure we will come back to that at the end, but out of courtesy I turn to the other amendments. Amendment 4, tabled by my noble friend Lady Noakes, proposes to rework the notion of control in the definition of a contracting authority in amended Clause 1(3)(b), to be consistent with the notion of a controlled person in Schedule 2. We have looked at this again in dialogue with the concerned stakeholders, notably the Local Government Association.

The meaning of control in Clause 1 is different from that in Schedule 2, and they need to be kept separate. The use of “control” in Clause 1, which sets out the contracting authority definition, is intended to ensure that contracting authorities that have a board where public authorities appoint more than half the members are themselves considered to be contracting authorities. This might include, for example, some centralised procurement authorities.

By contrast, the “controlled person” for the purposes of Schedule 2 is much narrower and intentionally very limited as it is intended to capture only a narrow group of entities, closely owned and controlled by contracting authorities. It requires that the controlling contracting authority is a “parent”, within the meaning of the Companies Act 2006. Although this might cover some of the same ground as majority board appointments, the concept used in Clause 1, it is not the same thing, and the text of the amendment can be satisfied in other ways. There is also a secondary activity threshold, which means that 80% of the activities carried out by the controlled person must be on behalf of its controlling authority. I am afraid that neither factor is appropriate to the contracting authority definition and their inclusion would have the effect of taking many organisations outside the scope of the contracting authority definition.

I recognise that, as my noble friend said, consistency is often desirable, but these terms achieve different aims. It is important that the Procurement Bill covers, as closely as possible, the same scope of bodies as in the existing procurement regulations, both for certainty and continuity for our authorities and to ensure compliance with the definition of a contracting authority in our free trade agreements.

I should, in passing, thank my noble friend Lady Noakes for her Amendment 190, which reflects discussion in Committee and which the Government are glad to support.

Moving on, I come to some of the very wide points made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, although it is possible that some of these will come up again later on Report. It may be disappointing to the noble Lord, but we cannot go into the detail of individual contracts. Where a contract has been found to have underperformed or the PPE provided was not up to standard, the Department of Health and Social Care is working to reach a successful outcome—this includes mediation—for the taxpayer.

Offers for the supply of PPE came from a wide range of people from within government and outside. No matter where they came from, offers went through a robust process of checks and controls led by officials. This included price and quality checks as well as due diligence and credibility. As for Medpro, this is a live issue; we are currently engaged in a mediation process with PPE Medpro and I am therefore unable to comment on the specifics of this contract.

More positively, however, the Covid inquiry will cover procurement and the distribution of key equipment and supplies, including PPE and ventilators. In my view, that is quite right. It will also identify the lessons to be learned from all this and inform preparation for future pandemics across the UK.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

I thank the Minister; that is a helpful reply and I am indebted to her. She has referred us to later amendments—I think she is referring to the amendment tabled by her noble friend Lady Stroud in the 10th group, on modern day slavery, which I am supporting—but a number of my questions go much wider than that. I would be appreciative if, between now and our discussion on Wednesday, she could give further consideration to what she can answer, some of which is not covered specifically by the point she has just made about confidentiality. Could she touch on what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is saying now about how the NHS should be caught under the same terms as everything else that she has been arguing? Our failure to do this has been highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and others, and demonstrates an inconsistency in how we handle these things.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 24th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, in a sense, this amendment is very different from my first two. None the less, we are seeking here to use procurement legislation to advance government policy in relation to the awful practice of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. The practice was found by the China Tribunal—as advised by Edward Fitzgerald KC, who provided expert legal opinion to it—to be a crime against humanity and part of a possible genocide against Falun Gong.

Forced organ harvesting in China involves the removal of organs from a living prisoner of conscience for the purpose of transportation, killing the victim in the process. It is state sanctioned and widespread throughout China, with the Chinese Communist Party targeting individuals because of their religious and spiritual beliefs or ethnicity. The victims are known primarily to be Falun Gong practitioners, but more recent evidence indicates that Uighur Muslims are also targeted on a massive scale. Further to that, there are several lines of evidence showing that Tibetan and house Christians are likely victims of forced organ harvesting.

Regarding Uighurs and other minorities, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published its report on Xinjiang in August, stating:

“Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.”


It also stated that the treatment of Uighurs and others in Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party

“may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

That is a most important and profound statement, made only three months ago.

Both Uighur and Falun Gong practitioners are arbitrarily arrested, detained in camps and tortured. They face sexual violence, disappear while in detention and are murdered for their organs, on a vast scale. A study published in April this year in the American Journal of Transplantation investigated whether Chinese transplant surgeons established first that the prisoners are dead, before procuring their hearts and lungs, or whether the cause of death was the organ procurement itself. The study was based on the dead donor rule—the most fundamental ethical rule in organ transplantation. It states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is formally pronounced dead; the procurement of organs must not cause the donor’s death.

The paper, entitled Execution by Organ Procurement: Breaching the Dead Donor Rule in China, was written by Matthew Robertson and Dr Jacob Lavee. Dr Lavee is a transplant surgeon and the founder and a former director of the heart surgery unit at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel. In 2005, a patient told him that his insurance company had scheduled a heart transplant operation for him that would take place in two weeks. The patient flew to China and received the heart as arranged. That would be impossible unless the time of death of the donor was known in advance. Following this incident, Dr Lavee spearheaded the organ transplantation law in Israel, the first of its kind in the world, which prevented insurance companies from reimbursing expenses associated with illicitly obtained organs. Along with a range of reforms encouraging domestic donation, this stopped the China-to-Israel organ-trafficking pipeline in its tracks.

During this recent research, Robertson and Lavee found, in 71 different Chinese medical studies published between 1980 and 2015, sourced from 56 hospitals in 33 cities, that brain death could not properly have been declared. Therefore, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the cause of the donor’s death. The authors state in a recent article in the Tablet,

“the act of execution was joined with the act of heart removal, and was carried out by surgeons on the operating table.”

Just think of that.

My amendment is designed to exclude suppliers located in a country at high risk of forced organ harvesting from being awarded a public contract involving any device or equipment intended for use in organ transplant medicine or activities relating to human tissue or any service or goods relating to organ transplant medicine or activities involving human tissue. Essentially, it would prevent any service or goods that may have been involved in or developed off the back of the forced organ harvesting trade from entering the UK. This includes organ transplant training, such as the training of Chinese organ transplant services, related education and research, as well as organ transplantation equipment.

I have been very encouraged by the Government’s recent willingness to legislate on this issue, such as through my amendment to the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill last year, which included consent provisions for imported human tissue for use in medicines; and the amendments to the Health and Care Bill in April this year, prohibiting the commercialisation of organ tourism. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, have been huge supporters of this approach and I am glad to see them here today.

These legislative steps have set a good precedent, both in our country and as a signal globally. I emphasise to the Minister that passing amendments such as this into British law is significant internationally. Other countries observe what is happening, and we are part of a global movement to try to get action to stop this reprehensible behaviour.

I am grateful to the Government for their sympathy for our approach, but I want to go further. In April this year, it was stated in a ground-breaking business and human rights legal advisory, written by international law firm Global Rights Compliance, entitled Do No Harm: Mitigating Human Rights Risks when Interacting with International Medical Institutions & Professionals in Transplantation Medicine, that

“medical professionals and institutions who have collaborations with Chinese medical institutions involved in forced organ harvesting face a risk of being charged with complicity in international crimes, including crimes against humanity.”

It goes on to explain that

“aiding and abetting ‘consists of practical assistance, encouragement, or moral support which has a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime’.”

Prestigious medical institutions, such as the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, are now taking action. In April this year, the society issued a policy that it would no longer accept submissions to its journal or for presentations at its conference related to transplantation and involving either organs or tissue from human donors in the People’s Republic of China. My forced organ harvesting amendment to the Procurement Bill is critical to protect our UK medical professionals and institutions from complicity. I beg to move.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in what was a powerful, disturbing and very thoughtful speech. I think all of us who are privileged to be in the Committee today are indebted to him for that and the way he introduced this group of amendments, to which I am a signatory, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff. She sends her apologies for not being able to be physically present today, but she strongly supports the amendment, as does the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro. It is worth bearing in mind that both of those noble Lords have held very high office in the medical institutions in this country and it is good that their names are attached either to the amendment or to the arguments that go with it.

I declare interests as vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uyghurs, who the noble Lord referred to, and on Hong Kong, as patron of Hong Kong Watch and as a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. This amendment deals with a gruesome and barbaric lethal practice that has been prevalent in China. Last Thursday, here in the Moses Room, a debate was held on the International Relations and Defence Select Committee report on China, trade and security. The noble Viscount, Lord Younger of Leckie, was present throughout proceedings and the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, was present and contributed to those proceedings, during the course of which a number of us referred to the levels of trade and, inter alia, the level of procurement that is carried out with China by the United Kingdom.

The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, pointed out that we have a £40 billion deficit in trade with the People’s Republic of China. That would be reason enough for considering, in the context of resilience and dependency, why procurement policies with a country designated by the Government as recently as last month as “a threat” to the United Kingdom should be radically readdressed. During the debate last Thursday in the Moses Room, I referred to earlier debates in this Committee on the Bill specifically about Hikvision. It is worth recalling that the noble Lord, Lord True, was gracious enough to have several meetings in his office to discuss this, as well as dealing with it at that stage. I know the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, well enough—I congratulate her, as others have done, on her appointment as Minister—to know that she will take this as seriously as he did.

The company Hikvision is responsible for the surveillance cameras in Xinjiang referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. But these cameras were purchased through our procurement policies by great departments of state and are used in local government and by public authorities up and down the length and breadth of this country. These cameras are used to impose the surveillance state on the Uighur Muslims referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt.

At the conclusion of our debate last Thursday, the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park, promised he would write to me in response to my question specifically about whether, during the next set of proceedings on the Bill—therefore, on Report—the amendments that many of us argued for at earlier stages will be agreed by the Government. I hope that the noble Baroness’s officials will talk to his officials before he writes that letter, so that we genuinely get joined-up government on this.

I hope they will also look at the Biden Administration’s legislation on goods made by slave labour, something that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and I have raised in other legislation and that we both, as well as other members of the Committee, feel very strongly about. They should also look at legislation the Biden Administration introduced called the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which draw together the prioritisations of investing in domestic industry, tackling climate change and reducing dependency on authoritarian regimes. All those things should be done in the context of this Bill.

In parentheses, I remind the Committee that we bought 1 billion—not 1 million, but 1 billion—lateral flow tests from the People’s Republic of China and 24 billion items of personal protective equipment where China was recorded as the country of origin. The cost to the United Kingdom was a staggering £10.9 billion—about the equivalent of our now reduced overseas aid and development budget. This is British taxpayers’ money pouring through our procurements into the pockets of a country that stands accused of the appalling barbarism identified in Amendment 185, and indeed of genocide.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I was talking about the international angle and the importance of doing things internationally. I am particularly grateful for the reminder of the need to discuss these issues with my noble friend Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park. I will also talk to the FCDO, DHSC and DIT about the UK-China hospital partnership and whether there has been any use of UK Export Finance. I have not been briefed on the issue, but I will write to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who is not in his place, and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, if they are content.

Turning to the main issue, I must resist this amendment on a number of counts, which I will explain. First, it treats suppliers as excluded simply for being located in a country at high risk of organ harvesting. This is guilt by association. It would undermine the principle, which runs throughout the exclusions regime, that suppliers can be excluded only where the supplier or a connected person has committed relevant misconduct. This is really important to ensure fairness and proportionality in exclusion decisions. The amendment could also have perverse effects—for example, preventing the NHS procuring life-saving devices in a country, even though they have nothing to do with organ harvesting or people trafficking.

Finally, there is already a provision in the Bill which would allow for the exclusion of suppliers who participate in forced organ harvesting. The Bill is clear that any serious breach of ethical or professional standards applicable to the supplier would meet the discretionary exclusion ground for professional misconduct. It is almost certain that involvement in these practices by suppliers of goods or services related to transplant medicine or human tissue would constitute a breach under the detailed standards set by health sector institutions.

The exclusion ground of professional misconduct is intended precisely to cover all the particular ethical issues that arise in different industries and sectors. That is of course an exclusion we agreed earlier, which merited further discussion. The grounds for exclusion cannot and should not list every issue within a particular industry. I should repeat that the exclusion and debarment regime in the Bill represents a significant overhaul and enhancement of the EU system; we should not forget that.

Finally, to respond to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I have already promised, in his absence, to write on the subject of the hospital, but I am also of course aware of the concerns regarding Hikvision.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

I apologise to the noble Baroness; I got trapped in the Chamber when the doors were locked at the end of the Division—it serves me right. Some people may wish it had been permanent. I am grateful to the noble Baroness and look forward to reading her reply in Hansard.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I look forward to getting delayed in the Lobby in the next Division.

I am aware of the concerns regarding Hikvision and other Chinese technology companies; we take these concerns extremely seriously, as the noble Lord knows. We are taking action in the Bill to introduce a new ground for exclusion, specifically to address situations where a supplier poses a threat to national security. The new exclusion ground allows a contracting authority to reject bids from suppliers that the authority considers pose a threat to the national security of the United Kingdom.

It is the long-standing policy of successive British Governments that judgment as to whether genocide has occurred is for a competent national or international court. It is not for the contracting authorities. Genocide is a crime and, like other crimes, whether it has occurred should be decided after consideration of all the evidence available in the context of a credible judicial process.

This has been an important debate. I have learned a lot but, for today, I respectfully request that this amendment be withdrawn.