Procurement Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 6th July 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, in supporting Amendments 85 and 87, I declare my interests as someone with small and medium-sized businesses in adult social care; as the chair of a renewable energy company; and as someone with 44 years of experience in the SME sector—taking away the 10 and a half years of my Front-Bench life, which excluded me from my businesses.

I start by supporting the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Lansley. They very much touch on what the SME sector faces constantly: the challenge of being able to enter into procurement. Today, I had a delegation of small and medium-sized manufacturers come to me from Leicester because they are fed up to the back teeth with constantly being outed from the process of some public sector contracts, with which we could reinvigorate our manufacturing sector. Covid taught us a lot about outsourcing. What we want to do is build back our insourcing. It hits all the challenges that we want to get to net zero on.

Listening to their struggles, I know, having come from the textiles industry at the early age of 19, that this country is remarkably good at producing goods if people are given the opportunities. This Bill will be one of those routes in to being able to demonstrate how much this country can focus on supporting industry, making the procurement system a lot easier. I know that, when we have to do this in adult social care, it is a nightmare to get through the processes because we as an independent business are competing with large organisations that are based overseas and have tens of thousands of pounds to put behind writing bid tenders.

I champion small and medium-sized businesses—particularly from the Midlands because that is my place and I will always champion it—but we are constantly missing out on the great talent that we have here. Reducing our carbon footprint because we can produce things here is a no-brainer for me.

I will go back to my script, which I have worked a little bit on. In its guidance on sustainable procurement, the World Bank recognises the role that procurement can play in driving sustainability goals and highlights the value-for-money benefits of sustainable procurement, stating:

“Sustainable procurement is strategic procurement practice at its optimum.”


Taking sustainable procurement considerations into account from the outset of the procurement process is critical. These amendments will help to deliver on that vision and meet the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendation in its progress report to Parliament last week that procurement decisions by all government departments be aligned with the net-zero goals.

In ensuring that contracting authorities design a procurement system that proactively seeks out suppliers who are doing the right thing and providing goods and services that help to deliver a resilient society and tackle climate change and biodiversity loss, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will look at these changes and try to incorporate them in the Bill. If we have an opportunity, we should take it now because it will save the planet and will save our own sectors in this country as well.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am happy to support Amendments 85 and 87 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. As we have heard, procurement is an incredibly powerful tool and, if we do not use it in the right way, we will never get to our net-zero targets.

I thoroughly support the aim to shift the ambition of any new procurement regime to positively reward and incentivise suppliers who are innovating and providing climate-positive, sustainable products. As well as helping to achieve our climate and environmental goals, it will bring economic benefits. I would go further and say that we should not award any contracts to people who do not fulfil these categories from now on.

I note that the Government’s response to the consultation on the procurement Green Paper commented that many respondents had

“provided details of aspects that they would like contracting authorities to take greater account of, for example more focus on social and environmental impact.”

This amendment would help to ensure that contracting authorities always take this goal forward. The net-zero strategy, which many of us have referred to, clearly establishes the strategic importance of net zero at the project design stage. This amendment would make it much easier to draw this golden thread right through the procurement process to the end product.

With that in mind, I conclude that this amendment to incorporate the climate, environment and wider public benefits of procurement at preliminary market engagement when the authority’s procurement exercise is at the design stage is fully in line with policy. It needs only to be reflected in the Bill in the permissive way in which it is expressed in this amendment. I very much hope that the Minister will welcome it.

Before I sit down, I support Amendment 82 from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. As someone who has chaired many charities and tried to work with local authorities about picking up contracts that have lapsed, such as meals on wheels, I can say that you really need to know in advance what money might be available. No one should take the charities sector for granted in this respect.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness. This group of amendments brings together three different but equally important threads that are material to this Bill, each of which deserves a place in these debates on the Bill in its own right.

First, there are the environmental points, which were mentioned a moment ago by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, and noble Lords subsequently added to them. They are fundamental. If it is government policy to aim at challenging targets to save our environment, that must be written into every aspect of public policy. It must be written into this aspect of public policy and others. We should not leave any opportunity going begging. This is an opportunity to have that in a Bill and to make sure that it is clearly understood by all those involved in the various diverse aspects of the procurement system.

Equally important is the question of how we regenerate the economy. Central to that must be the role of SMEs. They are a vital cog in the economy. They are the acorns from which the future will grow. They can also be very compatible with the environmental arguments to which we have referred. The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, and my noble friend Lord Aberdare are important. I know that we will return to them on subsequent amendments, but we must not lose sight of them because these elements are vital to regenerating the economy in a sustainable way.

The third aspect, which I want to concentrate on for a moment, is disability. That agenda has been close to my heart for the past 40 or 50 years. The speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, brought it home to us. As long ago as 1981, I had brought to my attention the social definition of disability: that a handicap is a relationship between a disabled person and his or her environment, be that the social environment, the physical environment or the psychological environment, and that we may or may not be able to do anything about the basic disability but we can almost always do something about the environment, be that the physical environment, the social environment or the psychological environment. Therefore, the extent to which a disability leads to a handicap rests with us in society in controlling those three elements. Clearly, that responsibility must run into all aspects of economic life and is therefore relevant to the Procurement Bill before us.

I very much hope that the amendments we have heard about—in particular, Amendment 141 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, but others as well—are passed to ensure that this matter is written into the Bill and that we have no misunderstanding. These three elements—the environmental element, the small business and economic regeneration element and the disability element—are central to the procurement system.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 13th July 2022 Grand Committee

I will sit down, but this is an important group of amendments. It is about putting in the Bill the strategic priorities of the Government, so that people who read it understand what they are, and having a proper process whereby this Parliament can scrutinise it.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. Before I speak to Amendment 66, I express my wholehearted support for the amendments so well introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. Of course, this is a place where we see the colours of the Government, because this is how they spend their money. So, this is not about idle words—it is about hard cash and what actually happens on the ground.

Having worked in local government on a London council, I know the power of procurement—it is absolutely massive. The amendment that I am introducing—I am pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is supporting it—is about how we can ensure the health and sustainability of food and catering services. That priority appears to be currently missing across the NPPS. My amendment sets out in subsection (3A) a range of topics that must be covered in relation to food, including the requirement to set targets on those matters. I know that the targets are a matter for the NPPS, but I have specified a minimum target, which has come from the national food strategy.

In common with other noble Lords, I see this amendment as addressing a key strategic priority, which is both nationally and locally important: that high-priority, cross-cutting topics such as sustainability and the health of our food system must be front and centre in legislation, rather than being left to a policy statement that could be changed unilaterally when we get a change of Government. While I fully accept that you have to have flexibility and be able to change, this argument applies to the technical detail and second- order priorities. It seems reasonable to assume that it is unlikely that considerations such as local and environmentally sustainable sourcing, servings and diets, or the management of resource inputs and waste outputs, will cease to be key national or local priorities, even in the medium to long term. Even were we to fully address them, we would wish to be watchful and continue to prioritise them to ensure that they remain addressed.

I have been pleased to see that the Government agree with me on the importance of this issue, hence the recent public commitment in the government food strategy to consult on extending the government buying standards for food and catering services across the whole of the public sector and the accompanying Defra consultation on how we are going to do it. The government food strategy also agrees that public sector food should be healthier, more sustainable and provided by a range of local suppliers, which will improve accountability and inform future policy changes. It also commits us to requiring public organisations to report on the food that they buy, where they serve it and what they waste. I think that this amendment is wholly uncontroversial. It simply captures the key topics that make up the buying standards.

My amendment sets one minimum target on the face of the Bill in relation to local and sustainable sourcing. The government food strategy has an aspirational target that 50% of food by value should be sustainable or local, but my assumption in setting a target of 30%, rising to 50%, is that the strategy’s target was not intended to mean that 50% of food should be local but unsustainable, with the other 50% being wholly sustainable but from miles away. I have therefore anticipated a degree of overlap from the start, until, over time, both sides meet the 50% criteria.

I do not think that there are any sensible grounds to reject this amendment on the basis that procurement authorities are wholly on top of this agenda and that a statutory footing for food and catering standards, however flexible, is therefore unnecessary. Rather, a considerable amount more might be done to strengthen the oversight of food and catering.

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee highlighted a number of issues in its report last year. Monitoring appeared to be almost absent, no penalties were ever applied where standards were visibly not adhered to and an independent survey covered in the Select Committee report found that 60% of secondary schools were not even following the school food standards. Another report found that half of hospitals were not complying with the government buying standards—you can see why that happens when they get paid by Coca-Cola to keep a machine in their lobby, which then becomes part of a hospital’s budget.

Its conclusion was that we do not have a clear picture of how frequently and effectively buying standards are being followed by the public bodies that are mandated to follow the standards. It means that food supply chains cannot normalise around one set of baseline standards. If we put a framework for the food aspects of the NPPS on a statutory footing, it will flow down through all areas of the contracts.

Before leaving this subsection, I draw noble Lords’ attention to what has happened in one particular place in the UK—Preston. Between 2010 and 2016, the council estimated that it lost roughly 60p in every £1 from central government payments. Preston City Council identified the biggest organisations in the city—council, university, police and housing associations—and worked out that they had a combined annual spend of £750 million. In 2012-13, only £1 of every £20 stayed in the local economy. It was reworked so that, by 2017, the six local public bodies spent £38 million in Preston itself and £292 million in the area. It used the social value Act, a 2013 law that requires people who commission public services to think about how they can ensure wider social, economic and environmental gain. Local food obviously creates local jobs in horticulture, which is also set out in the Government’s response to the National Food Strategy. A target on local spend will only help to make this really work.

Proposed new subsection (3B) takes the recommendation of an updated reference diet for the nation, in line with our health and sustainability goals. As Henry Dimbleby explained in the food strategy, this diet, which he recommended to be published by the FSA working with the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, Defra and a range of other consultees, would create a single reference point and a consistent approach across government policies. The NFS observed that

“Dietary guidance in the UK is based on evidence of the health effects of individual nutrients and foods rather than overall diet”.


Therefore, it is not consistent. It continues:

“Our current Eatwell guide, the closest we have to a reference diet, does not take sustainability into account”—


at all. The absence of mandatory dietary guidance for public procurement has been widely cited as one of the reasons—in fact, probably the main reason—for the poor quality of food on offer in public settings. Creating a legal obligation for food procured by the public sector will not only avoid inconsistencies—as in an “eat as I say, not as I do” approach—but allow the Government to lead by example.

The point of all this is that it empowers local communities and farmers, creates jobs and makes children more interested in food. All the way through, it will help to change the health of our nation and put us on a much better footing. If this diet is created in the future, the Minister of the Crown who produces the NPPS would be obliged to have regard to it, which does not tie the Government’s hands or force them to carry out work they do not want to. It merely provides for joined-up governance.

With those remarks, I reiterate my belief that this amendment is completely uncontroversial and ought to meet the Government’s support. I commend it to the Minister and look forward to hearing their views.

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. I have already spoken to the positive case for the inclusion of climate and nature in the Bill. Amendments 65 and 546, to which I have added my name, would offer the particular benefit of providing additional stability or, if noble Lords wish, discouraging repeated tinkering through the frequent updates of the national procurement policy statement by putting the essentials of the NPPS in the Bill.

I make one other point, which relates to the contrast between the Green Paper and the language on the national procurement policy statement. The Green Paper said, strongly and correctly, that

“money spent through public procurement will be used to deliver government priorities through projects and programmes that generate economic growth, help our communities recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and tackle climate change.”

These have all been mentioned already by noble Lords. Elsewhere,

“government spending must be leveraged to play its part in the UK’s economic recovery, opening up public contracts to more small businesses and social enterprises to innovate in public service delivery, and meeting our net-zero carbon target by 2050.”

The eventual text of the current non-statutory NPPS is perhaps a little more modest in its application: it only requires contracting authorities to have regard to considering contributing to the UK’s climate target—but not to its interim carbon budgets or climate adaptation—and to considering identifying opportunities to enhance biodiversity. There are no specific environmental targets. With such a large annual spend on public procurement, this may be a missed opportunity for the Government to strengthen these provisions by instead requiring contracting authorities to have regard to actively contributing to specific climate and nature targets, rather than just considering contributing to them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

I particularly did not use the prism of public sector procurement professions, because I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, had already made the case for the NHS, and others had made it for different government departments and professionals. I was trying to point out that there is a different aspect to this. This is about helping business by making it simpler for it to get involved in procurement, particularly small to medium-sized enterprises. That is the Government’s desired aim. A lack of detail in Clause 11, along with the fact that the national procurement strategy statement may not be done, makes that really difficult for business.

I come back to the view that everything here helps not just procurement professionals and government but businesses, particularly small to medium-sized enterprises, to be successful. It is really important that the Bill contains a co-ordinated and codified approach to the Government’s strategy on public sector procurement, and that it is not left to myriad different policies and Bills, for the sake of business being able to negotiate and navigate what is at the moment the very complicated field of public sector procurement. If the Government do not take up many of the amendments about the environment, food and social value, I assure the Committee that their aim to simplify public sector procurement, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises, will not happen.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I just wanted to add something to my amendment; I thank Members of the Committee for their support. I have very little time for Brexit, as probably everybody knows, but when the French attempted to do this, they were stopped under EU rules as it was to do with restrictive trading. Now that we are out of the EU, we have a chance to produce a fantastic procurement Bill that favours small and medium-sized enterprises, local procurement, local health and local sustainability. If we do not take that chance, frankly we will have missed one of the great opportunities that Brexit gave us.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish the noble Lord, Lord True, well. I hope that he feels better than he did. I will speak to Amendment 68 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hayman, and Amendment 80 in our names and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I recognise that there has been a plethora of really good amendments that we support; it would be impossible to go through everybody’s amendments, but I am particularly pleased to see those in the names of my noble friends Lady Thornton and Lord Hunt.

I praise the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, again for the brilliance of her “may”s to “must”s and “must”s to “may”s. I feel for her, because I do that sort of thing all the time. The change of one word is astonishingly important. I recognise how difficult it was for her to move the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, which changes “may” to “must”, when all of her amendments to later parts of the Bill change “must” to “may”. I can see the split in the Conservatives between those who wish to see greater market involvement, the Minister in the middle with his socialist bent, and the others seeking to restrict the role of the state.

Our amendments, particularly Amendment 68, which builds on Amendment 74 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, are about the process, which is particularly important. But first, to pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, Amendment 60 from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, is crucial, as otherwise the rest of the amendments are pointless. We will have the most brilliant national procurement policy statement that is not published and is not mandatory. I agree with all the points and comments that have been made about environmental principles, the very important points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, about food, what the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, said about Wales, and all the different things that everyone has mentioned, but the Government are not required to publish the statement.

The first question the Minister needs to answer is: what has happened since June 2021, when the Government published the national procurement policy statement that can be found on their website and the accompanying note that says they will legislate to ensure that when people procure, they must have regard to the statement? The Government stated that they would provide a legislative vehicle that would ensure that the national procurement policy statement was adhered to by business, or whoever the contracting authorities are. Yet, in the Bill, there is a legislative vehicle of sorts, but it is nowhere near what was envisaged in June 2021. Why has BEIS or the Cabinet Office changed its mind between what was going to be required in June 2021 and what is now in this legislation? I am pleased that there is a legislative vehicle, but the changing of “may” to “must” by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, is absolutely fundamental and crucial, because it will require all these other things that we have discussed over the past hour—so ably and with great effect, I think—to be in the Bill.

I just say this, because I know that the noble Lord, Lord True, will say that it is a mixture of Lord Coaker the socialist, other liberals, Greens and goodness knows who else—some wet people on his own side and so on. He will say it is completely and utterly ridiculous and dismiss it. However, I am a bit of an anorak and I look at what the Government publish and what you can find if you look on the internet and google things. The Government very helpfully provide all sorts of information. The letter of 7 June that the noble Lord, Lord True, had from the Constitution Committee was published; helpfully, so was his response of 27 June. The serious point that I make is that all the points that have been made in Committee about changing “may” to “must” and the mandatory requirement that many of us think is essential are supported by the Constitution Committee. The Minister will know that, because he was written to on 7 June by its chair, my noble friend Lady Drake.

I will not read the whole of the letter, just the final paragraph:

“The Committee would be grateful for clarification as to why the statement of priorities is not mandatory, given that it is considered important enough to require consultation and Parliamentary approval. Further information you can provide as to the justification for this approach would be welcome.”


In other words, the cross-party Select Committee is saying to the Government that they have got it wrong. In Clause 12(1), it should not be

“A Minister of the Crown may publish a statement”;


it should be that a Minister of the Crown “must” publish a statement. The Select Committee agrees with the amendment that has been tabled, and so I think do a large number of this Committee. The Minister, however, has already made his mind up because, on 27 June, he wrote back to say that the Government do not agree. For the benefit of the Committee, it is important for us to understand why the Minister thinks that the movers of these amendments, such as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and those of us who support them are wrong and why he wrote the letter back on 27 June to the Select Committee chair, my noble friend Lady Drake, explaining why she was wrong. I think that is really important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 124A, which stands in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, who is involved in other parliamentary duties at this point. She asked whether I would speak to it on her behalf, and I am pleased to do so.

The amendment specifically relates to the need for all contracting authorities to be required to ensure that the award criteria include environmental impact considerations. This, of course, is a provision which stands in its own right in the general context but also specifically relating to Scotland. It is worth noting that the genesis of this amendment comes from the Law Society of Scotland and, as such, we should take very good note of it. The society emphasises that for Scotland, procurement legislation is devolved, as we know, and that the regulations applicable to Scotland—those which have been transferred into Scots law from EU directives—include the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015, the Utilities Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2016 and the Concessions Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2016.

In fact, the Scottish devolution settlement specifies that all procurement matters that are not specifically reserved under Schedule 5 to the Scotland Act 1998 are devolved unless, as always, the UK Parliament tries to modify them, subject to the Sewel convention. As we all know, use of the Sewel powers can be extremely controversial at times. The Scottish Government have flagged up their opposition to such intervention by the UK Government in the context of the Bill.

As noble Lords will be aware, the Green Party is a partner in the Scottish Government, procurement regulations in Scotland have a number of environmental considerations built into them and the EU principles largely remain in force. It is not the case that UK contracting authorities with reserved functions will be subject to UK rules. For example, the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations 2011 are UK-wide, as I understand it, and that has a significance in this context.

This amendment seeks to make it a statutory responsibility for contracting authorities, in setting award criteria, to

“take account of the environmental impact of the award”.

This would place a parallel emphasis on environmental impact in the context of English or UK contracts, as is the case in Scotland. As the Law Society of Scotland has stated:

“It is important that the Bill does not lead to confusion in the UK for parties, given that different rules will apply in the UK market”.


Inevitably, given the devolution settlement, there will be occasions when legislation in Scotland and England differs for a variety of reasons relating to different values, circumstances or aspirations, but where there is largely agreement on public policy, as there surely is on the environmental impacts to be taken into account, common sense would dictate that words along the lines of Amendment 124A should be built into the Bill.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 124 and 127 in the name of the my noble friend Lady Worthington. As always, I return to the issue of food: the Committee on Climate Change reported last week that the public sector serves 1.9 billion meals a year. That is an unbelievably big responsibility and impacts on the environment, our health, how people co-operate socially, what we grow and agriculture. If we cannot have principles about the environment, public good and public health within this public procurement then it is really not fit for purpose because this is, I think, a massive area of concern to everyone in this Room.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 18th July 2022 Grand Committee

I recognise that the Government are beginning to wrestle with the substantial task of removing Hikvision and Dahua technology cameras from the public sector supply chain. One person about whom I have no doubts is the noble Lord, Lord True, who, as I have already indicated, has already been extremely helpful on this matter. But this will become possible only with a timetable and a developed plan, which requires transparency about the extent of the problem. I hope the Minister will consider what more the Government can do to fully outline the extent of Hikvision’s and Dahua’s presence in the UK—they already have 1 million cameras in this country—so that we can finally discuss a reasonable timetable for their removal, as is happening in other Five Eyes countries such as the United States.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I speak on behalf of my noble friend Lady Worthington, who cannot be here, to support our Amendment 452, which makes transparency provisions, in particular on issues of climate change. I welcome the Minister’s commitment at Second Reading that the Government

“want to deliver the highest possible standards of transparency in public procurement”.—[Official Report, 25/5/22; col. 856.]

While the Bill does not include a general duty of transparency compared with previous procurement rules, which required that contracting authorities act in a transparent manner, the Government have said:

“Transparency will be fundamental to the new regime. Extended transparency requirements and a single digital platform on which procurement data will be published will mean that decisions and processes can be monitored by anybody that wishes to do so.”


The Bill widens the authorities’ duties to publish notices and information on their procurement activities, and the provisions under Clauses 86 and 88 should improve transparency by making such notices available through a specified online system. This is welcome, but there is no substantive information on what exactly is going to be published. Instead, Clause 86 provides for appropriate authorities, through secondary legislation, to make regulations that will set out how notices and information will be published.

The amendment in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Worthington is intended to clarify what the regulations for the publication of notices, documents and information must contain as a minimum, by ensuring that any regulations include provisions around the availability of notices or information and that these are easily accessible.

Open and accessible procurement data will be crucial in the years ahead to enable modelling of the impacts of public contracts on carbon emissions, particularly when it comes to renewal. Spend Network has started to collect procurement data on every public tender and contract in the world and to map some of this impact on a freely available basis, but it has been hampered by a lack of good-quality inputs. Nevertheless, the data available has confirmed that a 20% reduction of emissions at each contract renewal would

“see the UK government’s contracting still emitting 686,000 tonnes of carbon per month by 2030”,

but that

“poor quality data meant that we were only able to evaluate 40% of the data”.

The recent Written Question to the Minister from my noble friend Lady Worthington highlighted the lack of easily accessible data being kept by departments on both contracts and emissions from those contracts. Will the Minister agree to this simple amendment, which would ensure that there is clarity in the legislation about transparency and accessibility, especially in relation to carbon?

While I am on my feet and we are discussing transparency in contracts, I would like to ask the Minister something that I was asked at the weekend, about the £360 million Palantir contract to manage NHS data. I was contacted by a very worried local NHS manager, who says that a list of 300 redundancies has already been drawn up in the NHS digital department and that this contract with Palantir—a second person has now left the NHS to work for Palantir—is a “done and dusted deal”. I would be incredibly happy if the Minister could give me a small reassurance that I could pass on to my friend, because obviously everyone in his department is really anxious.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the Minister for introducing all the government amendments in this group. Again, it is very helpful, as there are quite a few of them, so we appreciate that.

I will speak to my four amendments and offer my support for the others in this group, so ably introduced by noble Lords. My first three are Amendments 455, 458 and 459A, which are on digital registers and digital information. I will speak to those first. Amendment 455 would require the establishment of a digital register of all public procurement for all notices; Amendment 458 would allow the creation of a digital registration system for suppliers; and Amendment 459A would require a contracting authority to publish required procurement documents on a single digital platform. The intended purpose is to allow public spending priorities and the performance of the procurement system to be understood by stakeholders, and therefore allow authorities to plan and deliver procurement in a strategic manner.

The Green Paper Transforming Public Procurement said that a

“lack of standardisation, transparency and interoperability is preventing the UK from harnessing the opportunities that open, common and shared data could bring”,

and that

“a clear digital procurement strategy focused on transparency results in greater participation and increased value for money driven by competition.”

The Cabinet Office Declaration on Government Reform policy paper, published in June last year, also supports this when it says:

“We must do better at making our data available to all so that we can be more effectively held to account.”


It also includes an action to:

“Ensure all data is as open as possible to public and third parties.”


I am sure we would all support that.

We were therefore very pleased to see this ambition reiterated by the Minister at Second Reading when he said:

“I acknowledge that transparency has been a key ask for the House. The House expects that transparency will be improved. We believe that the Bill does this.”—[Official Report, 25/5/22; col. 926.]


We have learned from today’s debate that real transparency is incredibly important to noble Lords, as this Bill progresses. We therefore believe that it is essential to put the Green Paper ambitions into the Bill, both to deliver on this promise effectively and to make sure that it cannot be rolled back or diluted, which is one of our concerns. An unambiguous statement of this commitment would help secure adequate resources, and I am sure the Minister would agree with me on the importance of this.

Looking at Clause 88, on information relating to a procurement, in Part 8 of the Bill—there are number of subsections, so I will not read it all out—I just want to check that I am reading its implications correctly. If I understand it, it creates powers to have a single supplier portal right across government. If this is correct, it is extremely positive, but I would like clarification from the Minister that that is exactly the intention of this clause. If that is the case, it would save a huge amount of time across government and across business, allowing companies to register and update their credentials once to do business with UK government. It would also allow them to establish unique IDs for contracting authorities and, we hope, then move forward in a much more practical and efficient way, which is what we would all like to see. The purpose of my Amendment 455 is to allow the Bill and the Government to articulate this objective much more clearly. I would be grateful if the Minister can clarify this.

The other vital part of the Government’s data ambitions—to bring together all the notices and data around procurement into a single source—should also have the same elevation in the Bill. It is really important that the information can then be fed back into a variety of user-friendly ways to local authorities, major procurement companies and others, so that we can generate data-driven insights and properly track the performance of different companies. Because there is spend, there is live, ongoing and updated data, which will be extremely helpful. There seems to be the ambition behind the UK’s adoption and approval of the open contracting data standard, about which it would again be helpful to get clarification. The purpose of my three amendments on data is to gain clearer provisions in this regard in the Bill, which will be easier to understand for anyone working in the procurement industry or wanting to gain a contract.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, also has a number of amendments on data, and I thank him for his support for one of my amendments. I know he will speak to his amendments, but I think we are in the same place on all this. I am extremely grateful for his amendments and will listen carefully to what he has to say when he introduces them.

I turn to my other amendment, Amendment 459, and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for her support for it. Its purpose is to require each ministerial department to calculate the estimated carbon emissions from public contracts entered into and to lay an annual report on this before Parliament. The amendment seeks to look at the impact of the procurement regime from an emissions perspective. Given the weather at the moment, climate change is on everyone’s mind, so I hope the Minister and the Government will think carefully about the areas where we are looking to improve the impact of the Procurement Bill—on climate change, emissions, net zero and so forth.

There is a National Audit Office report on public sector emissions, which is extremely worth looking at. I urge the Minister to have a close look at it to see whether there is any way that its recommendations can also be part of what we are trying to achieve through the Procurement Bill. The main issue is around reporting: although many companies will do it voluntarily, many others do not report at all, so there is no balance in the information that we have. For example, there are no mandatory emissions measurements or reporting requirements for the public sector as a whole. The wider public sector includes local authorities, schools and hospitals, all of which may well have high carbon emissions. Peers for the Planet published a very good report on local authorities and net zero, in which it noted that there was little consistency in local government reporting of emissions. I understand that a lot of this concerns BEIS, but the Procurement Bill provides us with an opportunity to look at whether this is something that would have a positive impact on driving down emissions.

This concludes the introduction of my amendments and I will turn now to those of other noble Lords. Many noble Lords spoke in support of the different amendments on the publication of notices and the concerns around freedom of information. My noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in particular, made an extremely important speech about his two amendments. He said again that it is a welcome ambition to simplify what we are trying to achieve here with procurement. As I have said, any noble Lord who worked on OJEU will be very grateful for simplification. As was debated last week, it is terribly important that we do not make things more difficult for SMEs, charities, voluntary organisations and, as my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn said, for freelancers, who were often forgotten when we debated this Bill previously. Transparency is clearly very important when looking at those kinds of contracts.

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[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. I am introducing Amendments 310, 318 and 322. I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone.

My amendments follow on a lot from things that have already been mentioned. They are designed to remedy what appears to be a significant inequity in the treatment of environmental offences relative to other offences listed in Schedules 6 and 7, which relate to mandatory and discretionary exclusion grounds. In Schedule 6, there is no mention of mandatory exclusions for environmental offences. Apparently, no environmental offence, however serious or wide-reaching in its impact on people’s health or finances or the wider environment, currently merits mandatory exclusion. In contrast, almost any offence in relation to employment agency law, common law or tax, however minor, triggers mandatory exclusion.

In Schedule 7 there are grounds for discretionary exclusion on environmental misconduct, but let us work through the terms of that exclusion. First, the authority is required to ignore any event predating the coming into force of the schedule. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has tabled an amendment to query that proposal, and I will be interested in the Minister’s response to her. I also note that the reference to an event rather than an offence seems to leave the contracting authority in doubt about whether they must exclude convictions for environmental offences after the date of coming into force where the conduct took place.

Secondly, the contracting authority has to decide whether the conduct caused or had the potential to cause significant harm to the environment. I would be very interested to hear about the breaches which are serious enough to result in convictions for offences—not, as I understand it, simple enforcement notices or civil penalties but actual offences—but do not even have the potential to cause significant harm to the environment. Still, the legislation erects an additional hurdle for contracting authorities with absolutely no clarity about what an insignificant offence looks like or why it is an offence if it is insignificant.

Thirdly, the contracting authority must consider whether the circumstances giving rise to the application of the exclusion are likely to recur. I do not believe that this is the Government’s intention, but if we wanted a regime which gave a surface-level semblance of treating environmental offences seriously in public procurement while making contracting authorities extremely reluctant in practice ever to exclude any supplier on environmental grounds, we have done it really well. However, I believe that that is not the Government’s intention, so I have tabled this amendment to achieve what I believe is needed and meant.

Amendment 310 makes an offence under any provision of environmental law subject to mandatory rather than discretionary exclusion. There is no judgment to be made about the potential for causing significant harm where there has been an environmental offence. An additional effect of this drafting is that the contracting authority would be required to disregard only offences that took place longer ago than the default position—set out in paragraph 42 of Schedule 6—of five years.

Amendment 318 provides a definition of environmental law, which is currently missing from the Bill. It is taken from last year’s Environment Act, Amendment 322 removes the existing discretionary exclusions in Schedule 7, as previously described. This is a modest proposal. It would mean that contracting authorities would receive clarity that convictions for offences against a defined range of environmental law in the past five years would always be grounds for mandatory exclusion. However, contractors would not necessarily be excluded out of hand. Contracting authorities would still have to give consideration to the likelihood of the circumstances occurring again or, if the amendments in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Wallace and Lord Fox, are accepted, the contractor would need to demonstrate this to everyone’s satisfaction.

Neither do the amendments I am speaking to create new burdens on contracting authorities; they merely replace an unclear discretionary exclusion with a clearer one. Authorities which intended never to give a moment’s consideration to contractors’ environmental records—which is what happens now—or to the possibility of excluding firms in any circumstances would now need to do a small amount of work in identifying whether convictions had taken place. I assume that the noble Lord, Lord True, would welcome that increased diligence and consideration. However, contracting authorities which did take their responsibilities seriously would now not need to worry about venturing out on an unguided journey into deciding whether a breach was significant. This seems far closer to the vision of procurement set out in the procurement Green Paper, which referred to the environment as one of the Government’s strategic policy priorities and specifically referenced a supplier’s plans for achieving environmental targets across its operations as an example that the switch to considering bids on the basis of most advantageous tender would deliver. It is also closer to the Bill’s Explanatory Notes, which refer to simplifying the procurement process and making it more transparent. Finally, it is closer to the vision that the noble Lord, Lord True, set out at Second Reading, which was quicker and simpler and better meets the needs of the UK.