Oral Answers to Questions

James Murray Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Commons Chamber

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

13. What steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to help ensure value for money in public procurement.

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Alex Burghart)]

Value for money is central to the Government’s long-standing procurement policy, as set out in everybody’s favourite Treasury document, “Managing Public Money”. Current procurement regulations require contracting authorities to select the most economically advantageous tender. The Procurement Act 2023—I am pleased to say that it has recently received Royal Assent—will streamline procurement processes and ensure that value for money remains one of the central tenets of the UK’s procurement regime.

[Alex Burghart]

I am pleased to be able to remind the House that the Government have already taken extraordinary steps to recover fraud money during the covid period. His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs remains committed to the recovery of covid-19 support scheme fraud. The Government are also committed to bearing down on fraud in the covid loan schemes. Some £13.2 million has been allocated to the National Investigation Service over three years to double its investigative capacity on bounce back loans and to fund other activities. This is just a small sample of the work being done to combat fraud across our Government.

[James Murray]

Further to the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist), billions of pounds of public money was wasted during the covid pandemic through dodgy contracts that we know were signed off by the Government. Labour has said that we will appoint a covid corruption commissioner to pursue every pound of public money that has been inappropriately lost from pandemic-related contracts, fraud and waste. Will the Minister borrow our plans?

[Alex Burghart]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman will have noted—I imagine he pays attention to such things—that we already set out in the spring statement last year the public sector fraud authority, which is based in the Cabinet Office and very ably handled by my colleague Baroness Neville-Rolfe. We have debated fraud during covid many times in the House. All the contracts handed out during covid were signed off by extremely able and capable civil servants who were working in very difficult circumstances and the idea that there was ministerial sign off of these things is wrong and must be contradicted whenever it is raised.