Contingencies Fund (No. 2) Bill

James Murray Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 11th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[James Murray (Ealing North) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

I thank the Financial Secretary for setting out the case for the Bill so clearly. The Bill seeks to amend the Contingencies Fund Act 1974, which is one of the monuments of a previous Labour Government. The 1974 Act embodies principles that are central to the accountability of Government, so its amendment should not be taken lightly.

This time last year, the Opposition fully accepted that the conditions of the pandemic made it necessary, expedient and right for there to be provision for the Government to act swiftly. We accepted that, in the rush of the early response to the outbreak, there could be times when it would not be possible to follow normal procurement processes. We accepted that, at certain points, the spot price paid for particular goods facing global shortages might be higher than it would otherwise have been, and we accepted that, on occasion, at a time when the Government were taking on entirely new responsibilities, some mistakes would be made. But we do not accept, and the British people will not accept, that what may have been excused in the early days of the outbreak has turned into a succession of failures and scandals, which it seems Ministers can no longer even see as wrong.

Last year, the Opposition agreed to a rise in the provision of the Contingencies Fund to some 50% of annual expenditure. While we accept that a higher than usual level for the Contingencies Fund is again in order and we will not be opposing the Bill, Ministers would do well to remember that the fund was created as a fall-back and that its extension is an emergency response, not an opportunity for unaccountability. Ministers seem to have forgotten that public money needs to be spent effectively, in a way that achieves value for money and commands public confidence.

The starkest example of failure by this Government must surely be their flagship Test and Trace scheme, a programme outsourced at great expense and the subject of a report published yesterday by the Public Accounts Committee, which was truly damning. The Government should be embarrassed and deeply apologetic over Test and Trace, which Lord Macpherson, who led the Treasury civil service from 2005 to 2016, described as

“the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time.”

What makes it even worse is that everyone in the country desperately wanted Test and Trace to work. Everyone was willing the programme and its team to succeed. We all wanted and needed that money to be spent on a programme that would achieve its stated goal, and we have all witnessed the profound consequences of incompetence on such a scale. I lost count of the number of times that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) and my hon. Friends the Members for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) and for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) called for the Government simply to focus on getting Test and Trace working, yet Ministers did not.

The opening summary of the Public Accounts Committee’s report contains the following telling sentences:

“The Department of Health & Social Care justified the scale of investment, in part, on the basis that an effective test and trace system would help avoid a second national lockdown; but since its creation we have had two more lockdowns. There is still no…evidence to judge”

Test and Trace’s “overall effectiveness”.

Only people who have no real understanding of the value of money or the importance of public investment in changing lives for the better could be so reckless about how it is spent. We believe that the Government really need to learn from the last year, not only by accepting that the outbreak exposed the weakness of our rights at work and the impact of a decade of cuts to our public services, or by recognising that they repeatedly did too little, too late to protect the public’s health and our economy, but by making serious structural reforms to how they initiate and examine spending.

The shadow Chancellor, my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East, has set out how the next Labour Government would do things differently, by taking a robust and determined approach to ensuring that public money improves the lives of those we serve. She has explained how we would invite the Comptroller and Auditor General to submit an annual report to Parliament, bringing together the National Audit Office’s findings throughout the year into a single assessment of the effectiveness of public spending in those areas that it has examined. As my hon. Friend has said, we must hard-wire value for money into the budgetary process.

But the value for money aspect is not the only part of this extraordinary year for public spending that commands our attention. It would be possible to achieve value for money and yet still fall far short of other standards we expect. That is why the new clause that the Opposition will move in Committee seeks to improve the transparency of Government spending.

We know only too well, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) has set out, that the way in which procurement is conducted also matters very much. Put simply, the time to end emergency procurement is overdue. Covid, as she rightly observed, is no longer a surprise. Supply chains have been established and, while there are of course still significant challenges and responding quickly remains essential, there is no longer a case for the continued widespread use of emergency measures of procurement for items that the Government now know how and where to find.

Contract publication should now follow the normal rules, and when contracts fail to deliver, the Government should get money back. That is public money. “Deliver or you won’t get paid” is what contractors expect from every other organisation and company they supply. The Government must not be the softest touch in the market.

We must drive a culture of transparency throughout public spending. The new clause that we will move today seeks to improve the transparency of the Contingencies Fund, because that is what the Bill before us concerns, but it is time for every part of public spending to achieve better value for money and for the Government to use their spending power to improve standards in the way the public would expect. The Opposition believe that achieving these changes need not be difficult or controversial.

We recognise the power of public investment to transform people’s lives for the better. That is fundamentally why we, like the British public, cannot bear to see Ministers casually and carelessly waste public money on deals that do not deliver, on contracts that do not work and on outsourcing that should never have taken place. Every pound that this Government misspend makes it that bit harder for nurses to accept the Chancellor’s pleading that a 1% pay rise is all he can afford. Every penny that this Government waste could have gone towards building a fairer, more secure future for our country. We will not be opposing the Second Reading of this Bill, but our new clause in Committee will set out a new standard of transparency that would pull Ministers up, force them to sharpen their focus on value for money and make sure we have more money to spend on the things that matter to us all.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Before I call Andrew Jones, I want to point out that although what we are dealing with is very important, we also have the Committee of the whole House and Third Reading, and then we have 70 contributions in the International Women’s Day debate. If people could keep that in mind as they consider the length of their contributions, I would be extremely grateful.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Murray [V]]

With the leave of the House, I would like to respond briefly to the debate and pick up on some of the contributions. First, I would like to address a comment by the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), who seemed to claim that I was not in my place during his speech. I would like to reassure him that I have been listening carefully throughout in the virtual Chamber, but perhaps he was not here earlier when I began my contribution virtually.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) made a powerful and important case about the link between trust and transparency and how important it is for us to take action in this place to reassert that link. She also set out how insulting the 1% pay rise—a real-terms pay cut—is to the nurses in our country. My hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) mentioned the huge waste that has happened through Test and Trace and the private outsourcing giants that have benefited from that money. It is telling that no Conservative Members today addressed Test and Trace and the spending on that programme, as far as I could tell. I found it curious, however, that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne), when trying to make a case around value for money, chose to focus on the time that the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) spent in City Hall, given that one of the most notable achievements of that right hon. Member in that office was to oversee £46 million of public money being spent on a garden bridge that was never built.

As I made clear in my opening remarks, we will not be opposing the Bill’s Second Reading, but in the Committee debate that follows, I will set out how our new clause aims to introduce a new standard of transparency, which we believe is urgently needed after the Government’s approach over the last year.