Business of the House

Clive Efford Excerpts

2nd reading & 3rd reading
Thursday 1st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this issue. The House’s sympathies will be with Ruth and Paul in these appalling circumstances. It is quite wrong for developers to sell substandard homes. Developers of new-build homes must meet their responsibilities, resolve issues quickly and treat homebuyers fairly when things go wrong. I sympathise with my hon. Friend, because as a constituency MP, one has sometimes found that developers have not been good at responding when there have been complaints, and there has been very little recourse. The building safety Bill will include provision for the new homes ombudsman scheme to provide stronger and effective redress for new-build homebuyers and to hold developers to account. This reform is long overdue, and it will be welcomed across the House.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I heard the answer that the Leader of the House gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), but we have to have the right checks and balances in place.

The Health Minister Lord Bethell held a series of meetings with companies that went on to win contracts worth over £1 billion, and the week in question was omitted from his diary. That raises questions about the role of civil servants in the letting of these contracts. Where is the monitoring officer for the letting of these contracts, and who signs them off?

We need a statement in this House on the role of the civil service when it comes to such issues so that we can reassure ourselves that civil servants are not being bullied into silence and that they are holding Ministers properly to account and making them abide by the rules. I suspect that the only reason why we know about the meetings is that a civil servant leaked the emails because they knew that wrongdoing was going on.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I think that a fundamentally foolish point. There were 27 meetings, nine of which led to contracts being awarded by my noble Friend Lord Bethell on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government when we were under great pressure to act. That was exactly what the Labour party was asking for. It asked that whatever was necessary should take place—it wanted speed, urgency and decisiveness. That was what the Government delivered. The Government had to get on with awarding contracts to ensure that supplies were in place.

The hon. Gentleman cannot have it both ways. If normal procurement procedures had been followed, it would have taken three to six months to award contracts—we would have been halfway through the pandemic before we had had a single extra piece of PPE. Would he have wanted such incompetent service? Is that what the Labour party would have done? Would it have just fiddled while Rome burned or would it have got on with things, as my noble Friend did?