Government PPE Contracts

David Linden Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara]

It is remarkable—we can always spot when a Tory is sinking beneath the waves when they start shouting “ferries” at us. Let us remember that this is a Government who awarded a ferry contract to a company with no boats.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

Is my hon. Friend aware, as the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan) perhaps is not, that the Seaborne Freight ferries contract cost £13 million? Is it not the case that people in glass houses ought not to throw stones from Crewe?

[Brendan O’Hara]

One would have hoped that people in glass houses, having thrown the first stone, would have realised that it was not the best idea.

Let me put on record that the NHS in Scotland used emergency procurement provisions to award PPE contracts without competition during the first wave of covid-19 but, crucially, the auditors are completely satisfied with the procurement arrangements in place and said that there was

“No evidence of preferential treatment or bias”

in the awarding of contracts in Scotland. I believe that that is the significant reason why our overall costs of pandemic procurement were less than a third of the UK’s, and it perhaps explains why the Government are now paying £770,000 every single day to store PPE in China. The Minister will be aware that I have tabled a series of questions today to ask how much of that PPE is still usable, how much of it meets the standards required for the UK, what quality control methods were used in securing it and the proportion of PPE that did not meet the standard required.