Covid-19: Businesses and the Private Sector

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Redfern (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, for initiating this debate, reflecting on how businesses and the private sector are collaborating to address this Covid pandemic, which is cutting across people’s lives and livelihoods, and—we hope—to formulate a pathway for businesses not only to survive but to thrive post Covid and get ready for the Brexit D-day. I welcome the continued Treasury support to help businesses large and small, financing them through furlough arrangements, grants or rate relief. Unfortunately, even with all that, not all businesses will survive this pandemic.

Even with such uncertainty, innovative organisations have not stopped taking action right away and offering their services. Companies have adapted quickly to change and redesigned their products or services, or even created new ones, to respond to demand. Textile factories have switched production from curtains and duvets to hand sanitisers, and clothing companies that produced wax jackets now make disposable clinical gowns and medical scrubs.

Post Covid, and post Brexit, it is essential that the Government support companies large and small and encourage them to help scale up, particularly in the engineering, agricultural, chemical and research sectors, thereby increasing their future contribution to UK supply chains, rather than us always looking globally. In the terms of a procurement exercise, let us see what the UK can do first. Tomorrow will present a vastly different landscape. Therefore, if we are to look closer to home with our supply chains, businesses in many areas—

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)]

Oh, we seem to have lost the noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, so we will go on to the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin.

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[Baroness Uddin]

I have finished.

[The Deputy Speaker]

My Lords, I apologise for some of the difficulties we had with sound there. I call the noble Lord, Lord Desai.

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[Lord Lang of Monkton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as per the Lords register. I welcome and congratulate my noble friend Lord Dobbs on securing and so effectively introducing this debate. There are certainly vital lessons to be learned from the pandemic about relations between business and government. I wholly endorse tributes paid to the medical and surgical skills of those at the sharp end of saving lives and curing victims, but within the Department of Health and the NHS, among the maze of administrative sectors and subsidiaries, there sometimes seems to be another world that speaks a different language.

The language of business embraces drive, expertise, capability and agility. By contrast, the ponderous language of government bureaucracy sometimes conjures thoughts of delay, control, check and recheck, distrust and aversion to risk. Everything seems to take so long. We hear of telephone calls, emails and letters going unanswered at a time when clothing manufacturers were, voluntarily and unasked, switching their profitable production lines to the manufacture of PPE, and the distillers of whisky and gin to sanitisers. One wonders why precious civil servants are used in, for example, the procurement and distribution of PPE. These tasks are second nature to the private sector, to which speed and accuracy are watchwords.

I am not making a general criticism of the Civil Service. I know from past experience that there are very many brilliant and dedicated civil servants. As a nation, we are deeply fortunate. But some things are surely best done by others. I welcome the progress that is now emerging, but there must be change in the future. The innate suspicion that parts of the Civil Service seem to harbour against the private sector must be overcome. Efficiency, inventiveness and adaptability are what we need and what it offers. Its concern is not ownership or control of chunks of government departments. In times of crisis it wants to help, to be consulted and to work in partnership. Going forward, there needs to be a rebooting of the relationship between the business world and government. Covid-19 has revealed that need. It is time for the private sector to be the first port of call instead of the last resort. That needs a change of culture which I hope the Government will initiate.

[The Deputy Speaker]

My Lords, after I call the next speaker, the Chair will be taken by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal.