Government PPE Contracts

Lloyd Russell-Moyle Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I was not criticising Members from the other place. I am just quoting what a Member from this place, who was a Health Minister at the time, said. I am asking this Minister today if he can give us clarity on what was said, because that is now on the public record. That is all I am asking the Minister for. I have not said that about any person from the other place—that is what a former Minister said in his diaries, so it would be nice if this Minister can give us some light on this whole murky affair.

Let us turn to the numbers because, as they say, the numbers don’t lie. Ten: how many times more likely to get a contract a company was if it was in the VIP lane. One in five: the proportion of emergency contracts handed out by the Government that have been flagged for corruption. Three and a half billion: the value, in pounds, of contracts given to the Tory party’s mates—that we know of. Three billion: the value, in pounds, of contracts awarded that warrant further investigation. None, zilch, zero: the number of times this Government have come clean about this dodgy Medpro scandal. A cover-up, a whitewash, events swept under the carpet—and now they have been dragged kicking and screaming to the House today to give an honest account of their shameful dealings. The public are sick of being ripped off and taken for fools. They want to know the truth.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Is it not now clear to the public that the Conservative party believes in one thing only: how much money it can grab from the public purse, give to its cronies and friends, and steal from the pockets of hard-working people in this country?

[Angela Rayner]

My hon. Friend captures the mood of the public. They want answers—they want to know what happened to their money and what happened with these contracts at the time they most needed the Government to act responsibly—so we have tabled today’s motion and will put it to a vote.

Let me be clear. We are not asking the Government to do anything that would undermine any chance of recovering our money or anything that would conflict with any police investigation, but for 10 months they have told us that they are in mediation. What progress has been made? When will they conclude that the mediation has failed and take action? Can they actually get our money back or are they just kicking the can down the road?

Our motion asks Ministers to hand the records over to the Public Accounts Committee—a body that this House relies on to hold them to account for public spending—because the only logical conclusion is that they do indeed have something to hide. The public deserve answers on whether the dodgy lobbying at the heart of this scandal played a part in how vast sums of taxpayers’ cash have been wasted and whether shameful profiteering has been enabled by this Government.

That leads me to my second simple question for the House today: will Conservative Members—the few who are in—now vote for a clean-up or for yet another cover-up? Just last week, the Government led Tory Members in the other place through the Not Content Lobby to block amendment 72 to their Procurement Bill, which would have banned VIP lanes in future procurement decisions. They voted it down. They voted to protect unlawful VIP access instead of protecting taxpayers’ money.

The Prime Minister, fresh from writing off the billions he carelessly lost to covid fraud, is peddling legislation full of loopholes that would give Tory Ministers free rein to do it all over again. The question for the House is whether to act to prevent a repeat. Today, I say to Conservative right hon. and hon. Members: “Learn your lesson. Don’t let this shameful episode be repeated.”

The loss and trauma of the pandemic were immense. Millions of families lost loved ones—some only got to say goodbye via an iPad as mothers, fathers, husbands, wives and friends slipped away—and then we learned that throughout that trauma, companies with WhatsApp links to Ministers were given special VIP access to contracts that have seen billions poured down the drain.

This Government have done untold damage to the public’s faith in politics. The first step in restoring trust is publishing these documents today. The public need answers about how this happened and they need them now, but they also deserve reassurances that it will never, ever be allowed to happen again. Taxpayers’ money must be treated with respect, not handed out in backroom deals to cronies or used as a passport to profiteering.

PPE Medpro is just the tip of the iceberg in this scandal. We now know that companies that got into the VIP lane were 10 times more likely to win a contract. We now know that many did not go through the so-called eight-stage process of due diligence, as Ministers have now admitted, and we now know that this left dozens of experienced British businesses out in the cold—businesses that had the expertise to procure PPE and ventilators precisely and fast; businesses that offered their help in our darkest hour; businesses whose only mistake was to play by the rules.

Not a single one of the companies referred to the VIP lane was referred by a politician of any political party other than the Conservative party. The then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove)—the Cabinet member who oversaw the entire emergency procurement programme —reportedly fast-tracked a bid from one of his own personal friends and donors, who went on to win hundreds of millions of pounds of public money. Last week, he said he had simply referred the bid from PPE Medpro to officials; but we also know that he passed it on directly to his ministerial colleague Lord Agnew.