Procurement Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Alton of Liverpool

Report stage
Monday 28th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

The millions and the thousands can multiply very rapidly in this debate. I apologise, but I think you get the point. It is over £20 million in the course of a year—£770,000 each and every single day.

I gave the noble Baroness notice of my intention to ask about this. Who authorised those acquisitions? Who decided that they should stay there? How much has it cost to date to store these items? How much has been budgeted to keep them in store at that cost of £770,000 every day, and for how long will they be stored? How much of the PPE that has been bought has proved to be defective and unusable? I would also like to know, first, how the Government intend to report the money returned to public funds by defaulting PPE suppliers through the actions of the faulty contract PPE recovery unit. Secondly, individual settlements are protected by commercial secrecy, so how will Parliament and the public be notified about money returned to public funds by defaulting PPE suppliers through the actions of the faulty contract PPE recovery unit? Thirdly, how do the Government intend to provide transparency and accountability in relation to money returned to public funds by defaulting PPE suppliers through the actions of the faulty contract PPE recovery unit?

It is clear that the NHS should be subject to far greater scrutiny, transparency and accountability. For all those reasons, I support Amendments 3 and 173 spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, which include the NHS in the definitions of a public authority for the purposes of the Bill.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Alton. When he speaks about the frailty of the NHS supply chain—I must declare my past presidency of the Health Care Supply Association—I am sure he is absolutely right to put these penetrating questions to the Minister.

I have two amendments in this group, Amendments 171 and 172, but I also want to speak to Amendments 3 and 173 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. She has rightly pointed to the potential confusion between two pieces of legislation in relation to the National Health Service and the procurement regime that it is to adopt in the future. The difficulty is compounded because, of course, we have not seen the draft regulations in relation to Clause 111, nor have we seen the draft regulations in relation to the amendment made in the Health and Care Act 2022 to the National Health Service Act 2006, after Section 12ZA. The 2022 Act gave huge powers to Ministers to establish their own procurement regime through regulations.

Clearly, there is every potential for confusion as to how these two sets of legislation are to work together, particularly if only NHS clinical services are to be covered by the disapplication in the Bill. That leaves a lot of questions for those working in the health and social care sectors as to how they are to operate the new processes. Given the nature of NHS commissioning and services, there are big questions about what happens if a contract incorporates clinical and non-clinical services. Under which set of regulations is procurement to be undertaken? Large hospital contracts—PFI contracts—often contain a mixture of clinical and non-clinical services, and the terms of the contract can sometimes last for 20 or more years.

Indeed, the more fundamental question is how we define “clinical services”. Some hospitals contract with private sector operators to provide, say, laboratory services the staff of which are employed by the private sector contractor. I would have called those clinical services; they are clearly directly related to clinical outcomes for patients. I am not at all sure how that is going to be covered by the two separate pieces of legislation. Of course, the NHS Confederation, which represents the bodies that operate the health service at the moment, including integrated care systems and NHS trusts, is obviously concerned about the confusion and potential distinction between the two sets of legislation.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Alton of Liverpool

Committee stage
Monday 24th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, in a sense, this amendment is very different from my first two. None the less, we are seeking here to use procurement legislation to advance government policy in relation to the awful practice of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. The practice was found by the China Tribunal—as advised by Edward Fitzgerald KC, who provided expert legal opinion to it—to be a crime against humanity and part of a possible genocide against Falun Gong.

Forced organ harvesting in China involves the removal of organs from a living prisoner of conscience for the purpose of transportation, killing the victim in the process. It is state sanctioned and widespread throughout China, with the Chinese Communist Party targeting individuals because of their religious and spiritual beliefs or ethnicity. The victims are known primarily to be Falun Gong practitioners, but more recent evidence indicates that Uighur Muslims are also targeted on a massive scale. Further to that, there are several lines of evidence showing that Tibetan and house Christians are likely victims of forced organ harvesting.

Regarding Uighurs and other minorities, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published its report on Xinjiang in August, stating:

“Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.”


It also stated that the treatment of Uighurs and others in Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party

“may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

That is a most important and profound statement, made only three months ago.

Both Uighur and Falun Gong practitioners are arbitrarily arrested, detained in camps and tortured. They face sexual violence, disappear while in detention and are murdered for their organs, on a vast scale. A study published in April this year in the American Journal of Transplantation investigated whether Chinese transplant surgeons established first that the prisoners are dead, before procuring their hearts and lungs, or whether the cause of death was the organ procurement itself. The study was based on the dead donor rule—the most fundamental ethical rule in organ transplantation. It states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is formally pronounced dead; the procurement of organs must not cause the donor’s death.

The paper, entitled Execution by Organ Procurement: Breaching the Dead Donor Rule in China, was written by Matthew Robertson and Dr Jacob Lavee. Dr Lavee is a transplant surgeon and the founder and a former director of the heart surgery unit at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel. In 2005, a patient told him that his insurance company had scheduled a heart transplant operation for him that would take place in two weeks. The patient flew to China and received the heart as arranged. That would be impossible unless the time of death of the donor was known in advance. Following this incident, Dr Lavee spearheaded the organ transplantation law in Israel, the first of its kind in the world, which prevented insurance companies from reimbursing expenses associated with illicitly obtained organs. Along with a range of reforms encouraging domestic donation, this stopped the China-to-Israel organ-trafficking pipeline in its tracks.

During this recent research, Robertson and Lavee found, in 71 different Chinese medical studies published between 1980 and 2015, sourced from 56 hospitals in 33 cities, that brain death could not properly have been declared. Therefore, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the cause of the donor’s death. The authors state in a recent article in the Tablet,

“the act of execution was joined with the act of heart removal, and was carried out by surgeons on the operating table.”

Just think of that.

My amendment is designed to exclude suppliers located in a country at high risk of forced organ harvesting from being awarded a public contract involving any device or equipment intended for use in organ transplant medicine or activities relating to human tissue or any service or goods relating to organ transplant medicine or activities involving human tissue. Essentially, it would prevent any service or goods that may have been involved in or developed off the back of the forced organ harvesting trade from entering the UK. This includes organ transplant training, such as the training of Chinese organ transplant services, related education and research, as well as organ transplantation equipment.

I have been very encouraged by the Government’s recent willingness to legislate on this issue, such as through my amendment to the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill last year, which included consent provisions for imported human tissue for use in medicines; and the amendments to the Health and Care Bill in April this year, prohibiting the commercialisation of organ tourism. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, have been huge supporters of this approach and I am glad to see them here today.

These legislative steps have set a good precedent, both in our country and as a signal globally. I emphasise to the Minister that passing amendments such as this into British law is significant internationally. Other countries observe what is happening, and we are part of a global movement to try to get action to stop this reprehensible behaviour.

I am grateful to the Government for their sympathy for our approach, but I want to go further. In April this year, it was stated in a ground-breaking business and human rights legal advisory, written by international law firm Global Rights Compliance, entitled Do No Harm: Mitigating Human Rights Risks when Interacting with International Medical Institutions & Professionals in Transplantation Medicine, that

“medical professionals and institutions who have collaborations with Chinese medical institutions involved in forced organ harvesting face a risk of being charged with complicity in international crimes, including crimes against humanity.”

It goes on to explain that

“aiding and abetting ‘consists of practical assistance, encouragement, or moral support which has a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime’.”

Prestigious medical institutions, such as the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, are now taking action. In April this year, the society issued a policy that it would no longer accept submissions to its journal or for presentations at its conference related to transplantation and involving either organs or tissue from human donors in the People’s Republic of China. My forced organ harvesting amendment to the Procurement Bill is critical to protect our UK medical professionals and institutions from complicity. I beg to move.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in what was a powerful, disturbing and very thoughtful speech. I think all of us who are privileged to be in the Committee today are indebted to him for that and the way he introduced this group of amendments, to which I am a signatory, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff. She sends her apologies for not being able to be physically present today, but she strongly supports the amendment, as does the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro. It is worth bearing in mind that both of those noble Lords have held very high office in the medical institutions in this country and it is good that their names are attached either to the amendment or to the arguments that go with it.

I declare interests as vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uyghurs, who the noble Lord referred to, and on Hong Kong, as patron of Hong Kong Watch and as a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. This amendment deals with a gruesome and barbaric lethal practice that has been prevalent in China. Last Thursday, here in the Moses Room, a debate was held on the International Relations and Defence Select Committee report on China, trade and security. The noble Viscount, Lord Younger of Leckie, was present throughout proceedings and the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, was present and contributed to those proceedings, during the course of which a number of us referred to the levels of trade and, inter alia, the level of procurement that is carried out with China by the United Kingdom.

The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, pointed out that we have a £40 billion deficit in trade with the People’s Republic of China. That would be reason enough for considering, in the context of resilience and dependency, why procurement policies with a country designated by the Government as recently as last month as “a threat” to the United Kingdom should be radically readdressed. During the debate last Thursday in the Moses Room, I referred to earlier debates in this Committee on the Bill specifically about Hikvision. It is worth recalling that the noble Lord, Lord True, was gracious enough to have several meetings in his office to discuss this, as well as dealing with it at that stage. I know the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, well enough—I congratulate her, as others have done, on her appointment as Minister—to know that she will take this as seriously as he did.

The company Hikvision is responsible for the surveillance cameras in Xinjiang referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. But these cameras were purchased through our procurement policies by great departments of state and are used in local government and by public authorities up and down the length and breadth of this country. These cameras are used to impose the surveillance state on the Uighur Muslims referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt.

At the conclusion of our debate last Thursday, the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park, promised he would write to me in response to my question specifically about whether, during the next set of proceedings on the Bill—therefore, on Report—the amendments that many of us argued for at earlier stages will be agreed by the Government. I hope that the noble Baroness’s officials will talk to his officials before he writes that letter, so that we genuinely get joined-up government on this.

I hope they will also look at the Biden Administration’s legislation on goods made by slave labour, something that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and I have raised in other legislation and that we both, as well as other members of the Committee, feel very strongly about. They should also look at legislation the Biden Administration introduced called the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which draw together the prioritisations of investing in domestic industry, tackling climate change and reducing dependency on authoritarian regimes. All those things should be done in the context of this Bill.

In parentheses, I remind the Committee that we bought 1 billion—not 1 million, but 1 billion—lateral flow tests from the People’s Republic of China and 24 billion items of personal protective equipment where China was recorded as the country of origin. The cost to the United Kingdom was a staggering £10.9 billion—about the equivalent of our now reduced overseas aid and development budget. This is British taxpayers’ money pouring through our procurements into the pockets of a country that stands accused of the appalling barbarism identified in Amendment 185, and indeed of genocide.