Randox Covid Contracts

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

Why? It was because the Government were trying to get out as many tests as possible. As I said, Randox processed—[Interruption.] Just to put it into context, Randox has, to date, carried out more than 15 million tests for covid-19, and identified more than 700,000 positive cases. That is 700,000 people who might otherwise have gone on to spread the disease. As a result of this testing capacity, they received the right advice to isolate, thereby protecting their friends, their family and society at large.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I am prepared to take at face value everything that she says about Randox, but it does then raise in my mind the question of what exact benefit the company had from engaging the services of Owen Paterson. That being the case, will the Minister commit now at the Dispatch Box to publish the minutes of the telephone conference call of which he was part?

[Gillian Keegan]

Obviously, I cannot answer that question. The right hon. Gentleman knows that the only people who can answer that question are those at Randox and the gentleman that he referred to—Owen Paterson.

[Mr Carmichael]

rose—

[Gillian Keegan]

I am happy to give way again.

[Mr Carmichael]

Just to be quite clear about this, is the Minister saying that her Department does not hold minutes of that conference call? That, from my experience of having been in government, would be a quite remarkable departure from accepted procedure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gillian Keegan]

The hon. Gentleman may have missed it when I said that we were abstaining.

This is an important debate and I do take this issue very seriously. I am a professional of 30 years’ standing before coming here. My professional reputation is important to me, and I make sure that we uphold the highest standards of professionalism. Make no mistake: it is important to me to get this right. There are facts here, and I have set out the facts correctly. We do not want to play at political games and gimmicks: this is not the right time to do that. It may well play well with audiences on Members’ social media channels, but it is not the right approach.

[Mr Carmichael]

The Minister has made it clear that the Government are not going to oppose this motion, so we might reasonably expect it to pass. She said on a number of occasions that she will revert to the House with regard to the question of scope. The motion is very detailed on the question of scope, and we anticipate that it will become an instruction to the Government. Can she give an indication of what material her Department, or any Government Department, might hold that would not be disclosed under the terms of this motion?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to take part in what I think has been one of the most remarkable debates I have seen since I became a Member of Parliament in 2001. The hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), who has just removed himself from the Chamber, said that he suspects there is not much to see here. I suspect he is probably right about that. But when we hear the concession from the Minister at the Dispatch Box that no record was taken of the telephone conference call involving Lord Bethell and Owen Paterson, and when we hear the somewhat improbable history outlined by the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) about the relationship between Lord Bethell and his various mobile phones, suspicious minds such as mine—and probably even worse—will ask why it would be that there is nothing much here to see.

[Gillian Keegan]

I just want to make clear what I said. We have been unable to locate a formal note of the meeting—that is what I have been told so far. That does not mean there isn’t one. We have been unable to locate one, but of course everything we have will be put in the Library.

[Mr Carmichael]

That is, indeed, an important distinction. I wonder whether the search for these minutes has extended as far as the shredding room. I say to the Minister and the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup), who will wind up the debate, that it would be helpful if the House could be told how many other documents might be within the purview of the specification outlined in the motion. That is, how many are similarly difficult to locate?

I caution those on the Treasury Bench that saying that documents and text messages and WhatsApp messages on Ministers’ phones cannot be found only lasts so long as a defence. A full inquiry is coming and the longer that somewhat less than substantial defences are thrown up, and the more dust is kicked up, the worse it will be for Government Ministers at the end of the day. If the information is there, with the knowledge and control of any Government Department, it should be disclosed under the terms of the motion, which the House is going to agree to.

The Minister said a number of times, including when I challenged her, that the Government would define the scope. With respect to her, the Government will not define the scope; it is the House that will define the scope, which has been very clearly laid out in the motion. I do not see what justification or excuse there could be, given the fairly careful construction of the motion, for not disclosing information. More important than that, even if there is a tiny loophole it is a question of doing the right thing and being seen to honour not just the letter but the spirit of the motion, which the House will pass later. That is why, to quote David Cameron again, sunlight is the best disinfectant. We need to have the fullest possible disclosure.

[Tony Lloyd]

This is a convenient time for me to intervene because that is the point I want to put to the right hon. Gentleman. As he knows, ministerial meetings are always minuted, but if documents are missing, what will the public believe if they find out that meetings have not been minuted? Even if it turns out in reality—in God’s time—that nothing bad happened, the public will, rightly, still believe that somebody is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Put simply, that is part of the distrust in politicians and in Government. We have to clear it up and ensure that we re-establish our reputation.

[Mr Carmichael]

One can only imagine what the public might believe in these circumstances. I fear that it may not be generous. Actually, you know what? It does not just reflect badly on the Government; it reflects badly on all of us in public life. That is why the way in which the Government have approached this whole matter since that dreadful vote two weeks ago has done so much damage to the standing of public life.

I know a bit about this issue because I spent the early years of my legal practice as a member of the civil service. I did my traineeship as a procurator fiscal depute at the Crown Office back in the dark days of the 1990s. We kept everything—we minuted everything—and when we had finished a meeting, we filed the minutes. Those pieces of paper sat in filing cabinets and archives for 30 years or however long it took, at which point they were taken out and put into the public domain. What that process of preparing files for publication taught me was that not everybody in the public service was always very careful in the way in which they filed pieces of paper. Anybody who has ever been in legal practice will know that occasionally papers for one client get mixed with papers for another.

As I say, that was back in the dark ages. I suspect that the notes prepared these days are not handwritten in fountain pens on little pieces of paper. There will be electronic records of them, and those electronic records are virtually impossible to destroy. That is why the question of documents being difficult to find stretches my credulity.

We all have respect for the Minister. When she started her speech, the only Government Members present were two Ministers, two Parliamentary Private Secretaries, a Whip and the hon. Member for Amber Valley. As I have said, I have never seen the House so poorly populated for a debate like this. Indeed, I have to say that I have never seen the civil service Box as thinly populated as it is today. That in itself is quite telling, because it comes back to the way in which the Government approach the issue. The most powerful people in any Parliament are Government Back Benchers, because they have the opportunity to defeat the Government. Anybody who has ever served in a Whips Office knows that. It is welcome that the Government will not contest the motion, but I am still worried about the lack of enthusiasm among Government Members for extracting maximum possible disclosure.

In her speech, the Minister outlined, quite properly and legitimately, the various significant achievements, including the vaccine roll-out. She reminded us of the situation in which we found ourselves in March 2020, when we did not really know what the future held. As the hon. Member for Amber Valley said, we would not have expected every i to be dotted and ever t to be crossed. However, at that point we all gave a significant amount of power to the Government. This House passed the Coronavirus Act 2020, which gives massive amounts of latitude to the Government, because we all felt it necessary to give them the powers to do what was needed in a situation where nobody knew what the future held. What I fear has not been properly understood is that, with those powers, we gave the Government a responsibility, but they and many of those around Government seem to have seen it not so much as a responsibility as an opportunity for enrichment. I say to the Minister and to all her colleagues that that attitude is at the heart of the problem and is, essentially, an abuse of the powers that we gave them when we passed that emergency legislation in March 2020. That is why the motion is so important.

Like every other Member in this House, I frequently sit down with businesses in my constituency and will help them, if possible, to get rid of penalties. That includes people charged for a late VAT return and farmers penalised in a draconian manner for making a minor and unintentional error in their claim for an agricultural support payment. Sometimes we are able to help them; sometimes we have to just shrug our shoulders after we have tried and say, “I’m really sorry, I tried but these are the rules.” Those constituents will only ever listen to me deliver that message again if they can be satisfied that the rules that so adversely affect them also apply to everybody else. The real damage that the Government seek to do in the way they have handled these matters is that they will never again be able to tell other people that they should not be held to the same standard.