Covid-19: Contracts and Public Inquiry

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate.

I start by saying something with which I hope most Members can agree: I welcome the announcement of a public inquiry and I am glad that the Government are committed to learning the lessons from one. After the most unprecedented time of our lives, when there was no prior institutional memory of what was likely to happen and the risk calculation suggested that a pandemic based on coronavirus was extremely unlikely, we none the less need to learn lessons from what we have gone through and work out how, if there is ever a future pandemic, which I hope there never will be, we ensure that we approach it differently. We must also try to learn lessons from a wider community, society and government perspective.

If we all agree with the concept of a public inquiry, that there are lessons to be learned and reviews that need to happen, and that we need to understand how to work better in future, what do we disagree on? Why are we here, other than for another debate to push forward the suggestion of Scottish independence, in all but another name? The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), who is no longer in his place, said clearly that he wishes to see a public inquiry this year; the first obvious thing on which we disagree, then, is the question of when. I acknowledge that there are arguments for both—I understand and accept that there is a logic to a quick inquiry and a logic to a longer one—but to me the basic premise is that an inquiry should have the opportunity to review what has happened calmly, and not while in the middle of or even near the challenges, or while we run the risk of those challenges coming back. That does not seem to be an inappropriate approach to take.

We have obviously made a huge amount of progress in recent months in terms of resuming normal life and hopefully being able to move back to what we did previously when we get to 19 July, but it remains the case—I presume that, when we pull back all the hyperbole and political machinations, everyone in the Chamber would accept this—that we are not necessarily absolutely and completely out of the woods yet, and throughout the winter a huge amount of work is going to have to be undertaken to make sure that we hold the line and do not go back to lockdowns and the like, to which we do not want to go back. With that in mind, I simply do not understand how we could conclude, on the balance of risk and the weight of evidence, that the inquiry should start immediately, or nearly immediately, when that would almost be guaranteed to take capacity out of our ability to prevent or reduce the chances of any problems over the coming winter. I think most average men and women on the street would accept that.

The second thing on which I fundamentally disagree—or on which those on the Government and Opposition Benches seem to disagree—is how cautious and careful we want to be about the conclusions we draw. I want to learn lessons from this pandemic; it is clear that there are lessons to be learned. I want the Government to improve and to be as effective and as efficient as they can be in terms of their procurement and processes—I say that as somebody who served on the Public Accounts Committee for 18 months in the previous Parliament and saw lots of examples of where we need to improve—but we forget the context of last year, simply to score political points, at our peril.

On procurement, the hon. Member for Inverclyde said that any junior procurement officer would understand from day one exactly how they should approach this. Well, any junior procurement officer would understand from day one that the circumstances of last March and April were entirely extraordinary and are unlikely to be repeated. The concept of procurement is to ensure a process that takes time to get a satisfactory outcome, but if we do not have that time then we have to accept that we are undertaking a prioritisation exercise that pits time against outcome.

If there are people on these Benches, including the hon. Member for Inverclyde, who genuinely think we should have gone through the process of tender, submissions, reviews, notices of publications, cool-off periods, mobilisations and all the things that so many of us who have operated either in local government or in this place for many years know about and understand—we understand the amount of time it takes to get through them—then they should come to this Chamber right now and argue that in March and April last year we should have put out a series of call to tenders for things we needed in our hospitals, our care homes and across our society. That was simply not proportionate or reasonable.

[Joanna Cherry]

I do not think anyone is suggesting that there should not have been an emergency contract tendering process. What people are suggesting is that there should not have been bias in who the contracts were awarded to. That is what the courts said.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

I am so grateful for the hon. and learned Lady’s intervention. She just spent about two minutes talking to this Chamber about the difference between bias and apparent bias, and she has just conflated the two points to make a political point.

On the need to be cautious and careful in the conclusions we have drawn, I just say calmy and gently to Members that there were opportunities for two approaches last year, and we should be very careful about drawing a conclusion on one that would not have put us in the best place to deal with the problems we were seeing last spring in an already very difficult circumstance.

Finally, what we clearly and obviously disagree with is the utility of the inquiry. All those who are calling for the inquiry to be brought forward and asking for additional scrutiny, as the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) rightly went on about, do not actually seem to want to scrutinise things or to be that interested in the evidence, because they have made their decisions already. The level of hyperbole, smear, rumour, gossip and assertion in this debate, from the moment it was started in that unseemly way by the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, shows that they are not interested in having a cool, calm and collected discussion about how we learn lessons, make things better and ensure the inquiry puts us in a better place if we are ever to suffer this or something similar again. They have decided what their answer is. They know what the outcome is. They know what the conclusion will be, and I certainly disagree with them on that basic premise.

Should lessons be learned? Yes, absolutely. Should an inquiry happen? Definitely. Should we do the exact opposite of what the SNP and to a lesser extent Labour have done and not seek to predetermine the outcome before we draw conclusions? I would certainly think that that was relatively sensible. Do I expect problems to be found and that things will need to be done better next time? Of course I do. That is the point of an inquiry. Will we, in a mature political democracy, acknowledge the difficulties of last spring in simply trying to ensure we had the things we needed at a time that we were never expecting and that it was never reasonable to assume would happen? Well, I certainly would, and I hope, in a cool, calm and collected way, that some of those who have engaged in hyperbole in this debate will acknowledge that too when things are not quite as political as this debate has been. Should we play political games with this? No, we should not. The one thing I agree about with the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber is that these are serious matters. They deserve to be treated with seriousness as a result.