Covid-19: Contracts and Mass Testing Programme

Lord Sikka Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

We have published 80% of the contracts to date and are working on publishing the rest. I hope that that will meet noble Lords’ expectations.

[Lord Sikka (Lab) [V]]

KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte and Ernst & Young have been fined for audit failures and have regularly been chastised by the regulator, even though they have been doing audits for over a century. They have no experience of test and trace or of dealing with viruses but have received multimillion-pound Covid contracts. What due diligence checks were carried out by the Government and how? Will the Government inform Parliament and allow a public audit of all their checks on these firms?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the circumstances of the pandemic were exceptional, and I am not sure that any large company had any experience of putting together a national test and trace programme. The firms to which the noble Lord refers have considerable consulting experience and the capacity to support the national rollout of a large organisation such as NHS Test and Trace. They have provided invaluable support to the country at a time of need. All our contracts are scrutinised extremely closely by the finance function in the DHSC, and we are supported in that by the government legal service and finance staff from the MoD and the Cabinet Office, for which we are enormously grateful.