Covid Contracts: Judicial Review

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 1st March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord puts it extremely well, and he takes me right back to those days. I remember making a public call for help with diagnostics, and an NHSBSA call centre was overwhelmed by 5,500 calls in a week—triaging them took nearly a month. The noble Lord is entirely right: getting through all of those who sought to help was an enormously difficult task, and those who proved to be effective assistants were not always the obvious ones. I could share anecdotes of surprising people who came forward and gave tremendous help, while those who you would think could help simply did not have what we needed. Those were extremely complicated times, and I pay enormous tribute to the officials who saw us through them.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister has been explaining how the centre was overwhelmed by the number of offers. In the early stages, why was it not dealt with by a greater degree of local decision-making and autonomy? Local authorities and hospital trusts were bypassed in this, as in a number of other areas, such as test and trace. Would it not have been much better to have allowed small companies and local authorities to bargain with each other about these offers in the first place?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

That is a reasonable question, and, in fact, that was our starting point: the noble Lord will remember that, at the beginning of all of this, we supplied PPE to 252 NHS trusts and no one else—everyone else sorted out their own PPE. The reason we had to change was that this was a global crisis: borders were shut, factories closed down and every country in the world was desperate for PPE. There was no facility for a procurement manager at an NHS trust, let alone a small social care home in the West Country; those avenues were all shut. That is why it took a massive national effort to secure PPE. We now have a portal that supplies more than 50,000 different NHS and social care units; as I explained earlier, we have an enormous stockpile to secure that. This has been one of the big learnings of the pandemic: in order to have resilient supply chains, there needs to be some national muscle to make sure that it works properly.