Fleur Anderson
Main Page: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)Department Debates - View all Fleur Anderson's debates with the Cabinet Office
(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Steve Barclay
My hon. Friend raises a very good and practical issue about how such businesses benefit from the public spend. I would draw his attention to things such as the Contracts Finder, which is a free-to-use platform that publishes details of contracts above £10,000 and £25,000 exactly to enable businesses to have greater transparency on the sort of contracts that are available.
Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)
I, too, congratulate you, Mr Speaker, on your chairing of the G7 Speakers conference and welcome the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the team to their places.
The next pandemic or major disaster could happen tomorrow. We have to learn our lessons from this pandemic and be much better prepared for it happening again. The covid-19 national foresight group has been capturing these live lessons, and it has concluded that a “strong and persistent theme” has been the
“lack of strategy and shared plan”
in the Government’s response. Its recommendations have spent nine months gathering dust. Will the Minister commit to implementing its recommendations, and would he meet the group?
Steve Barclay
The hon. Lady is right that we need to ensure that we learn the lessons, and that point was made a moment ago. It is why within Government we have been looking more widely at our resilience, with things such as the civil contingencies secretariat and the investment recently in the situation centre to enable Government to respond in a more agile and quicker way to issues as they arise. I am always keen to hear from whichever groups have contributions to make, and either I or one of the team will follow up on the point she raised.
Fleur Anderson
I thank the Minister for that, and I will be following it up with him.
The latest allegations about the Home Secretary’s secret meeting with British Airways, a billionaire Tory donor and the then Business Secretary, but with no official present, should concern us all. She is a serial offender for breaking the ministerial code previously. Will the new Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster hold an investigation into these allegations and actually start enforcing the code, or is it just there for show?
Steve Barclay
There is a clear process set out in the ministerial code. I am not aware that any ministerial colleague has breached that. Obviously, a due process is applied through PET—the propriety and ethics team—in the Cabinet Office where concerns have been raised, but to date there is no evidence to suggest that that is the case.