Emergency Covid Contracts

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con)]

My Lords, I believe the noble Baroness is referring to meetings that took place within the Department of Health and Social Care. I am advised that those meetings were not declared or reported simply because of an administrative error, which has been corrected. Therefore, the implication that this was something intended to hide meetings which were obviously involved in seeking to respond to the Covid crisis and to encourage people, as I understand it, to be involved with assisting the national effort is wrong. Those meetings were regular meetings that took place within the department; they simply were not reported, through an administrative error. As to the specific details of the meetings, although I acknowledge the responsibility to answer on behalf of the Government, I would have to refer to the Department of Health and Social Care for details of their content.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to make one error with a Covid contract is unfortunate; two looks like carelessness but four is suspicious. Can the Minister explain why the meeting of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, with David Meller, a £60,000 donor to the Conservative Party, was not published on time in his ministerial meetings schedule? Why was that meeting incorrectly marked as being about testing materials, when in fact it was about the supply of PPE? Why was Meller Designs, which has no background in PPE supply, awarded an £86 million contract without any competition? And why was that contract not published on time? This is far from an isolated example. Surely these repeated breaches of ministerial and procurement rules need urgent and independent investigation now.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I said in my previous answer that I am not equipped, at this notice, to answer specific questions on specific meetings in another department about which allegations are being made. What I will say to the noble Baroness, and to everyone, is that an extraordinary effort was made, and was required of government by the country—and by opposition parties, as a matter of fact—to procure material that was needed to address the Covid crisis. While criticism is made of the alleged fast-track process of urgent procurement procedures, the absolute priority was to save lives, and those procedures were in line with procurement policy. There was extreme urgency, and indeed the Government’s case that emergency procurement regulations could be used because of the extreme urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic was upheld by a judge in the High Court in a recent case.