Randox Covid Contracts

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

This is a vital moment for everyone who cares about democracy, transparency, stemming the waste and abuse of public money and improving the way that our country responds to future crises. I find it extraordinary that, on a matter of such national significance, there was not a single Conservative Member on the list to speak during this debate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) damningly stated, this was the worst such situation that he had seen since he came into Parliament in 1979, when I was at the very tender age of just one year old.

Let us recall the reasons why we are here today. Randox paid Owen Paterson over £8,000 a month to lobby on its behalf. Mr Paterson then sat in on a call between Randox and Lord Bethell, the Health Minister responsible for handing out Government contracts, and Randox landed Government contracts worth more than half a billion pounds without any kind of proper tender process. There was no competition, just deals done behind closed doors, with discussions between a Government Minister, a Conservative MP and the company paying him handsomely to hawk its wares around the corridors of power. That tells us everything we need to know about how this Conservative Government go about their business.

But the situation with Randox is even more disturbing because of what happened next, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) set out very ably. After pocketing £133 million of public money to carry out covid testing, Randox failed to deliver, so in the middle of an unprecedented national crisis, we witnessed an unedifying spectacle: the Health Secretary sending the begging bowl around our universities asking to borrow equipment, just so Randox could deliver what it promised.

I echo what so many Opposition Members have said: the Minister has a very positive reputation on this side of the House, but my word, she has been given a hospital pass today. I regret that the hole in which she was placed has become larger, rather than smaller, during this debate.

[Dawn Butler]

There was a point about Randox that I neglected to mention. Is it not true that it failed to meet every single target that it was set, and yet, it was still awarded another contract six months later? That is unbelievable.

[Anneliese Dodds]

Many thanks to my hon. Friend; she is absolutely right that we have seen failure upon failure upon failure to meet the targets that were set, as she knows very well from her experience in this place and her focus on health matters. I find it extraordinary that the process of the Health Secretary having to call on others so that Randox could deliver what it had promised was described as an example of the “triple helix”. I remember those days very well. I remember academics begging the Government to come to them because they said that they could deliver the testing that our country needed. Were they listened to? We all know what happened: they were not listened to—they were ignored when our country needed that testing. This was an example not of collaboration, but of outsourcing that failed spectacularly on the Conservatives’ watch.

[Tony Lloyd]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. One of the real questions relates to the fact that the Minister told us that those involved in procurement were not constrained whatever by Government and Ministers’ actions. I know not whether that is absolutely accurate or not—we have to find out—but, in any case, did not the procurement process fail at precisely the point at which there was no examination of Randox’s capacity to deliver what it said it would? That is not clever procurement.

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[Anneliese Dodds]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point to the concrete impact of these failures and that procurement system. I will come to those matters, which he detailed very ably in the important speech he made a few minutes ago.

Again, the Minister maintained that all details of contracts are published. As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) set out, the Conservative Government were taken to court and found to have acted unlawfully because of their determination not to provide transparency over contracts. There is, again, a rewriting of history. What else did we see at that time? We saw the Conservative Government paying airlines to fly kits out to Randox’s laboratory in Northern Ireland for them to be analysed. We saw the Health Secretary warning people not to use Randox testing kits because they were “not up to standard”. In the end, Randox had to recall 750,000 tests because they were not good enough, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) rightly explained. It threw away more than 12,000 swabs in a single day because they had to be voided.

The Minister said that we should “pause and reflect” on what happened. Many of us have been pausing and reflecting, and we have been remembering what happened. Let us cast our minds back to the beginning of the pandemic. We remember when our country faced that nationwide testing shortage as the devastation of covid ripped through our communities. We remember when people were scared, when they were sick, when they were dying. We remember when, in Plymouth, people were told that their nearest testing centre was in Inverness. We remember when, in Bolton, at the epicentre of the pandemic, people could not access any testing at all. We remember, as my hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Kate Hollern) set out devastatingly, when care homes could not access the testing that they needed for elderly and vulnerable people. We remember the impact that that had.

The stakes could not have been higher. Lives depended on the Government securing the best possible testing contract. Almost 40,000 people died in care homes in the year after Owen Paterson’s phone call with Lord Bethell and Randox—care homes that took in people from hospital who had not been tested at all, and care homes whose own staff and residents could not access the tests that they needed until nearly two months after the national lockdown began, by which point it was too late. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd) said, we have to know whether this contracting played a role in those awful, awful outcomes.

How did the Government respond to their abject failures to deliver? Did they learn the lessons when new contracts came up, such as a contract for testing twice as lucrative as the previous one? Of course not. They doubled down—and Randox doubled up with a brand-new deal. Again, there was no competition; again, it was behind closed doors. Another £350 million of public money was dropped in the lap of a firm that just so happened to have a Conservative MP and former Secretary of State on its payroll.

The Minister has attempted to dispute that course of events. I say to her: prove it. Publish every dot and comma related to those deals: every email, every message, every letter between Ministers, special advisers and MPs. Explain why Lord Bethell’s WhatsApp messages have been lost as part of the sorry saga that my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne detailed, which is the 21st-century equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.” Come on! It is ridiculous.

Will the Minister please explain what on earth is going on with the minutes of the phone call with Lord Bethell and Paterson? We seem to have had mixed messages during the debate. At one point, it seemed that it was being suggested that there were no minutes—they never existed. That, in and of itself, raises extremely important questions. Were there no minutes of a meeting relating to two contracts worth £500 million of taxpayers’ money? It was then suggested, “Oh, it’s not that we necessarily know that there were no minutes, or that they were destroyed. No, we are unable to locate those minutes.” Well, when will they be located? They need to be located.

If the Department of Health and Social Care has been unable to locate the minutes, why has it been stating that it is not able to respond in a timely manner to freedom of information requests about the matter, without stating that that was because it believes that the minutes might not exist, that it has been unable to locate them, or whatever? Instead, it has just said that it is trying to respond to those FOIs. My goodness, what a mess.

Will the Minister explain how many other meetings might not have been minuted? How many other meetings might have minutes, but nobody knows where? When will we see them? Will she explain why the Government are so resistant to letting sunlight be the disinfectant that it needs to be in this process? As the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) said: just publish them.

We are talking today about one specific contract, but we all know that the problem does not begin and end with Randox. This is a Government who rolled out the red carpet for many more companies with close links to senior Conservatives. Just yesterday we learned that, of the 47 firms that won contracts via the so-called VIP lane that so many Opposition Members have referred to, four were helped by a former Conservative chair, four by the former Health Secretary and one by Dominic Cummings. I regret the fact that the Minister has stated that

“Ministers have no role…in the procurement process”.

That was not the case with the VIP lane, was it? We know that now, in black and white. The Minister has the opportunity to intervene if Ministers played no role in that VIP lane. She cannot intervene, because she knows that Ministers, including her Health Secretary, were recommending those companies.

[Gillian Keegan]

I thank the hon. Lady for the opportunity to intervene. I think the difference is that the VIP lane is about the identification of potential sources of supply. The procurement process starts after that; that is when procurement professionals, who are highly regulated, take over.

[Anneliese Dodds]

The Minister is obviously doing her very best, but yet again, I am afraid that this is not an edifying spectacle. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the recommendation led to companies receiving enormously expensive contracts. It is risible to suggest anything less. It is also risible to suggest that in those cases the Government followed their own emergency procurement guidance:

“Contracting authorities should maintain documentation on how they have considered and managed potential conflicts of interest in the procurement process…Particular attention should be taken to ensure…decisions are being made on the basis of relevant considerations and”—

wait for it—

“not personal recommendations.”

There was nothing inevitable about this. I know how things ran in Labour-run Wales, and they did not run like this.

We have seen that companies with links to the Conservative party were 10 times more likely to secure a contract than others. Public money was doled out based not on a company’s abilities but on its contacts book. When it comes to spending taxpayers’ money on testing and PPE equipment that can save lives, one would hope that the Government would take things more seriously, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle) said, the switch into an emergency process provides no justification for the ransacking of public money we have seen. As the hon. Member for Amber Valley said, an emergency situation was not a reason for having no process at all. In practice, there should have been more sensitivity around the process, not less.

Because of the Government’s approach, British businesses that did not have Tory MPs on speed dial missed out.

[Karl Turner]

I know that the Minister has not managed to answer the question that I posed earlier, but Arco, in the city of Hull, had existed for 135 years, had provided top-quality products to the NHS since its very inception, and could not get on the VIP lane. Why was it blocked?

[Anneliese Dodds]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Earlier in the debate, he detailed that sorry tale in devastating manner, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy). Arco had existed for 135 years, providing essential material. It was completely ignored, yet Ayanda Capital, for example—an investment firm with no PPE experience —ended up being used by the Government to purchase 50 million masks that were not even usable.

There were other companies that missed out. Multibrands International, based in Bradford, had been providing PPE to the Chinese Government since the end of 2019. It spent months trying to offer those services to the UK Government, but got absolutely nowhere. What did the Government do instead? They bought 400,000 protective gowns from Turkey that were unusable.

That is the way it always seems to be with the Conservative party: one rule for the Conservatives and their friends, another rule for everyone else—and it is the British people who pay the price. This Conservative Government are doing their best to suggest that every politician was engaged in graft. They are trying to drag everyone else down to their level and feed a growing disillusionment with our politics that damages us all. But Labour Members know that that is not true; I suspect that a fair few Conservative Members know it, too.

The people of Britain know when they are being taken for fools. When a party found guilty of breaking the rules tries to remake them to protect one of its own, there is a word for that: corruption. That is what this Prime Minister has brought into the heart of our politics, and the British people will not tolerate it. That is why the Prime Minister panicked last week and U-turned: because he knew that he had been rumbled.

We all have to play by the same rules, whatever the Prime Minister thinks. Labour has been clear that if we were in power, things would change. We would ban dodgy second jobs like those of the former Member for North Shropshire—and I mean a proper ban, not the watered-down cop-out that the Prime Minister is trying to lay down this afternoon. We would close the revolving door and ban Ministers from lobbying for at least five years after they leave office. We would stop Conservative plans to allow foreign money to flow into our politics, and ban the use of shell companies to hide the source of donations. We would create a new office for value for money and reform procurement rules to put an end to the industrial-scale wasting of public money, and we would create a new, genuinely independent integrity and ethics commission to restore the standards in public life that have been trashed by this Government.

This scandal has presented a clear choice about the kind of politics we want for our country. Do we want Boris Johnson’s politics of the gutter, or Keir Starmer’s politics of decency and integrity? Conservative Members have a choice today as well. They can abstain, under orders from the Prime Minister, their Chief Whip and the Leader of the House; or they can decide to make a stand. They can decide that they want to have a vote on this because they want to take a better path. Let us be very clear about the message that abstention is going to send. We have heard weasel words during this debate, and it seems clear that the scope of what the Government are proposing today, in terms of what they are willing to release, is far less than what Labour’s motion requires.

I see the Minister shaking her head. I sincerely hope that she has got that correct, because, having listened to what she said and compared it with what is written in the Labour motion, I think that there is far less that this Government are prepared to reveal.

[Gillian Keegan]

I said that we would advise on the scope, and, as the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) pointed out, it could be discussed. I have not yet commented on the scope because I do not yet have the details.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I hoped that the Minister might say at this stage, “Yes, absolutely—we will follow what Labour has called for. We will make sure that those documents are published; we will make sure that the minutes of meetings are set out.” Instead, she seems to have muddied the waters. I do not mean to be unfair to her, but that is what her response has done for me.

[Gillian Keegan]

rose—

[Anneliese Dodds]

I shall be happy if the Minister can clarify that.

[Gillian Keegan]

I do not want to appear to muddy the waters by not saying what the scope is. What we have said is that we will publish the documents and place them in the House Library. I am sure that the scope will be as broad as would be expected, to satisfy the hon. Lady.

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[Anneliese Dodds]

Of course, the way to guarantee that the scope will have the breadth that is required would be to have the binding vote in the House of Commons for which Labour is calling right now.

As the Minister knows, we have been here before, with promises being made about what the Government will be transparent about and what, in practice, they are willing to deliver, which far too often is far, far less. We have the chance now to move beyond that cover-up, and instead have the clean-up to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne referred. We have the chance to make amends. The Government have the chance. They can also immediately accept all outstanding freedom of information requests in relation to all PPE and testing contracts, and they can publish all documents and correspondence relating to the £3.5 billion-worth of contracts that have gone to Tory donors and Tory-linked companies.

Let us make that choice now: let us clear this up once and for all.