Personal Protective Equipment: Procurement

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am extremely grateful to my noble friend for giving me advance notice of his question. I am aware of the changes in procurement practices in the NHS, which I welcome. They will have a huge impact and protect us in the case of future pandemics. I am also aware of the phenomenal effort by British manufacturers, which have stepped up to the challenge of producing PPE and have, in my view, gone a lot further than anyone expected, producing around 50% of the NHS’s PPE. There have clearly been unintended consequences if this company, Wearwell, has somehow fallen off the procurement list. I would be happy to take a letter from my noble friend and look into the matter.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, public trust has clearly been lost over PPE procurement and the NAO report. What do the Government plan to do to restore it?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I simply do not accept the assumption of that question. I think that the public see a Government who stepped up to an enormous challenge and did their best under very difficult circumstances. Many of the public individually stood up as volunteers and many professionals returned to former jobs to help out. Many businesspeople turned over their capacity, their staff or their focus to help out in the pandemic, and the Government took on a huge amount of support from members of the public. These sweeping assumptions that somehow everything was done in a negative way are very unhelpful and in fact do not chime with the mood of the public at all.