Procurement Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Angela Rayner

2nd reading
Monday 9th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

That is the main point of the Bill, along with moving away from the European approach that essentially favours big business. Also involved is an attitude of Government, for which we can praise the Cabinet Office—particularly Gareth Rhys Williams, who has been absolutely brilliant in running the Government’s procurement and saving billions of pounds for taxpayers. The issue is about not just law but attitude of mind. To answer the point made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), the Bill will also make it easier for SMEs to be used by local authorities, which will know the local businesses and may know their reputations. That is an important easing.

I would like to see one easing more, although it may be difficult because of some of our international agreements, which may need to be changed. To my mind, it is quite unnecessary to include private utilities in this legislation. Private utilities’ motivation and risk appetite are completely different from the Government’s. Private utilities have shareholders who want value for money and they will award contracts to get the best value for money. They do not need bureaucratic procurement regulations to hang over them. There is scope within the Bill to remove more private utilities from the regime. I hope the Government will use that, both to extract them in future and ensure that the regime is as light touch as possible for private utilities. This is essentially another of the hangovers from the European Union that turned up in some of our international trade agreements because most European utilities are state owned. It is inappropriate and unnecessary for this country.

It may not surprise the House that I disagree with the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne on social value. Social value is in the eye of the beholder. The right hon. Lady may think that there is social value in trade union rights when it comes to procurement.

[Angela Rayner]

Hear, hear!

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I got a cheer from the Opposition Front Bench! I rarely get those, but on this occasion I have. I think giving trade union rights is straightforward cronyism: it is giving money to your mates and ensuring that your mates, who then fund the Labour party, do better out of it. The Opposition like it, and I think it dangerous. No doubt they could think of examples of things I might be in favour of—say, putting into a contract free speech as a social value—that they think are not necessary.

Value for money is fundamental, and I am glad of clause 12(1)(a)—that heroic clause in this great Bill. The right hon. Lady called the Bill a sticking plaster—quite some sticking plaster, running to so many clauses over 120 pages. Elastoplast does not produce sticking plasters of that size, I do not think. The key to procurement must be value for money—it must always be that, because taxpayers’ money is being spent. It is not about “nice to do” things, worthy things or virtue signalling; it is spending other people’s money, which must be spent as well as it possibly can be.

Within that, there may be a case for supporting innovation. Perhaps the commercial decision will be to spend money to innovate and get future savings, so that may be an exception. But that is the only one I can think of, other than where the Bill is absolutely excellent: in excluding those who have behaved badly. They may be foreign actors—there are powers to exclude on national security grounds—or companies that have behaved badly. The issue is of fundamental importance.

I might touch on Bain, which has been excluded from Government contracts for its involvement in the most extraordinary state capture of the South African Revenue Service. Many of us will know about the scandals, fraud and corruption that there have been in South Africa. The Zondo commission looked carefully at what Bain had been doing and discovered that it had been instrumental in state capture. A company with a fine veneer of respectability was involved in facilitating corruption of the worst kind in South Africa. As the Zondo commission reports, more than 2,000 experienced people in the South African Revenue Service, including inspectors, were removed. The Zondo commission said that that facilitated organised crime.

It is only right that this country should be able to stop companies involved in bad behaviour abroad from applying for contracts here. That is made easier under the Bill. The response of Bain, when challenged on this, was particularly poor. It simply attacked the whistleblower, a brave man called Athol Williams, who had the courage to point out what was going wrong. That important benefit will help with national security as well as with probity in our system.

I am at your time limit, Madam Deputy Speaker. I even had an intervention, for which I probably got a bonus minute.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Angela Rayner

Thursday 9th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I was going to point out to the right hon. Lady that business questions will follow in due course and that that would be her opportunity to raise such things with the Leader of the House.

[Angela Rayner]

Well, that was a way of deflecting from the actual serious question that the Government are not willing to answer because they know there is suspicion about the way in which they handled those contracts.

On the topic of protecting the public purse, as we speak this Government are frittering away almost half a million pounds a day on storing personal protective equipment unfit for human use. That is after £10 billion has already been wasted, alone, on unusable, overpriced and underdelivered PPE. In fact, useless PPE storage is costing the taxpayer nearly half a million pounds a day. Will the Government’s procurement Bill close the loophole and prevent cronyism from corrupting our politics and wasting public money?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

These charges made by the socialists are completely false. They have no bearing on reality and they completely ignore what was the requirement two years ago. We needed PPE. There was a global shortage. Everyone in the world was buying PPE, and British manufacturing managed to turn round and supply it in unprecedented quantities. If I remember rightly from when I was Leader of the House, domestically produced PPE went from about 1% to well over 70%, possibly even over 80%. This was an enormous effort, and it has to be said that everyone was calling for it at the time, because it was urgent to protect people in care homes, in hospitals and in offices as masks and PPE were demanded and this was delivered. The right hon. Lady would have sat on her hands and done nothing, expecting it to take months and months to procure a single pair of gloves.