Contingencies Fund (No. 2) Bill

Anthony Browne Excerpts

Committee of the whole House & Committee stage
Thursday 11th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)]

I rise to speak in favour of the amendment tabled by the Leader of the Opposition, which hopes to improve the transparency behind emergency spending that we are being asked to sign off. When the Conservative party took office 11 years ago, it promised people transparency and responsible spending. The Prime Minister’s predecessor even told us that sunlight was the best disinfectant—could we not do with some disinfectant to rid us of the stench of cronyism right now?

One hundred and eight million pounds to a pest control firm to make PPE; £60 million on antibody tests that did not work. To top it off, a £37 billion test and trace system that at times did not test and did not trace. It was run not by clinicians or the NHS, but by a failed phone company executive, who just so happened to be one of the Prime Minister’s mates from the other place.

Cronyism, irresponsible spending and sweetheart deals that handed the public’s taxes to their mates are what this Government are all about—a £133 million testing contract to a Tory donor, £108 million to Serco, and a £40,000 pay rise to Dominic Cummings. Under this Government, someone who breaks the rules and fails at their job gets a pay rise; those who save people’s lives get a pay cut. If the Conservative party cannot be trusted to spend people’s taxes wisely, it does not deserve to serve our country.

The Minister asked for questions, and I am sure we all look forward to some answers. Will he tell the House why as much as £11 million was spent on the initial trial version of the NHS Test and Trace app before it was abandoned? Will he confirm whether he personally played any part in recommending contractors to the Government over the past year? We are often told by the party of Government that money cannot be found to feed hungry schoolkids, or that the healthcare heroes who looked after our loved ones during the pandemic cannot have a pay rise. We are told by Conservative peers that nurses should be grateful for the job security they have.

The public have a right to know how their money is being spent. Covid contracts handed out to Tory friends and donors have now risen to almost £2 billion. Such money could have provided free school meals to each of the 1.4 million children in poverty, including nearly 4,000 children in Luton North. If there is money for the Prime Minister’s mates, there is money to feed hungry kids. If we can find £30 million for the bloke down the pub, we can find money to give nurses, and every other healthcare worker, a pay increase.

Conservative Members will say there was no choice at the start of the crisis and that it was an emergency, as it was. However, there is always a choice. Instead of turning to established PPE providers from the UK safety industry, Ministers chose a deal that handed £30 million to the Health and Social Care Secretary’s mate from down the pub. That is a cruel and blatant failure by this Government. The Bill asks us to sign off up to £266 billion in emergency loans by the Government. That might be necessary, but it is unnecessary for such a number to go unchecked.

It is our job as MPs across the House to hold the Government to account. The public expect better and for us to spend their money properly, which is why Labour has tabled this amendment. We are not saying that the Government should not do everything in their power to help people in an emergency; we are saying that they must never forget whose money they are spending, and who they need to answer to in the end: the British people.

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I agree with the shadow Minister that we need accountability and transparency, but there is already a whole framework for public spending. As others have said, all the amendment does is introduce more bureaucracy into the Contingency Fund, without adding any value from the perspective of public accountability.

We need to learn the lessons from all this. It is an unprecedented thing that hopefully will never happen again, but we must ensure that we learn those lessons. Fortunately, there are bodies that help us learn those lessons, such as the National Audit Office, which has already done several reports into procurement.

Given that the speeches made by various Members on the Opposition Benches have been all about scoring cheap party political points, casting aspersions on the Government and Ministers and so on, I thought it was worth quoting the finding of the main National Audit Office report about the issues to which they are referring. It said:

“In the examples we examined where there were potential conflicts of interest involving ministers, we found that the ministers had properly declared their interests, and we found no evidence of their involvement in procurement decisions or contract management.”

That is the National Audit Office, which has strong powers of investigation.

I find it rather disturbing that the Opposition are trying to use this important issue just to score cheap political points. I suppose I should not; I am a new politician, and I should get used to it. What I find most concerning about the Labour party is its clear disdain for the private sector. It is using this issue to criticise private sector manufacturers. The speaker before me, the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), for example, criticised companies that were trying to produce PPE. We did not have a PPE industry in the UK at the start of this—we imported it all—and I welcome the fact that lots of companies that had not made PPE put in the effort to develop it and then supply it to the national health service. That is to be welcomed.

The drugs company in my constituency, AstraZeneca, did not do any diagnostic testing. That was not what it did; it had no arm doing that. It said, “Right, we will learn how to do this”, and it did it. It set up a whole arm to do diagnostic testing. It did that at no profit, and that is now a huge part of the testing industry in the UK. It also agreed to produce the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine at no profit to itself and to give that to the developing world on a not-for-profit basis throughout the pandemic.

That is a private sector company, as is Pfizer, which produces the Pfizer vaccine, and Moderna, which does the Moderna vaccine. All these are private sector companies coming to our rescue and to the rescue of other countries around the world when we need it, and that is very much to be welcomed. I wish the Opposition would pay tribute to the efforts of the private sector, often working in collaboration with the public sector. It is a partnership.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Anthony Browne]

I will just give way to the hon. Lady before I finish.

[Meg Hillier]

The hon. Gentleman has talked a lot about money going out into the private sector, but a lot of this contingency money has gone into the public sector. The key point is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) highlighted, that it is taxpayers’ money. Surely the hon. Gentleman agrees that we should have clear oversight and regular reporting of how taxpayers’ money is being spent.

[Anthony Browne]

I agree, and I welcome the points that the hon. Lady makes. I did say in my speech on Second Reading that I welcome the fact that the Labour party have this new-found interest in value for money, because I absolutely believe that taxpayers’ money is not the Government’s money. It is taxpayers’ money and it should be treated as such. As I said earlier, we have sufficient mechanisms for accountability and transparency. We do not need this new clause, and I will not support it.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con) [V]]

I would like to speak to new clause 1. First, I am grateful to the Financial Secretary for putting the record straight. It was a reflection of the fact that there was no Opposition Minister on duty. It is suboptimal to have an Opposition Minister speaking by video link: Members have no opportunity to challenge some of his statements, many of which I thought were absolutely out of order. You are obviously the judge of that, Chair, but to call Ministers corrupt, as other Members have in this debate, or to accuse them of cronyism, is basically bringing this House into disrepute.

Yet again, we have the Opposition’s obsession that everything public sector is good and everything private sector is bad. It is simply outrageous. It goes back to that sturdy horse analogy. It is pulling the whole wagon, whether it be vaccine companies or indeed our GPs. Our GPs have done a wonderful job disseminating the vaccine to so many people, and it is heart-warming to go to those centres and see that. GPs are private practices. The health service has never been totally public sector, and we should recognise that. We should recognise the benefits that the private sector brings, just as the public sector clearly brings huge benefits, too.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones) that this new clause would simply bring an unnecessary added layer of bureaucracy. I absolutely support the need for accountability and the proper assessment of where taxpayers’ money is spent—we absolutely must be responsible about that—but I do not know where it would end under the new clause, because much of the money that we have provided to deal with the coronavirus crisis has been provided through the private sector, not least the loans through the banks. The hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) seemed to think that there were no checks on that process, which is clearly not the case. Banks go through a lot of checks, even when the Government are guaranteeing loans, so that is simply not correct.