Procurement Act 2023 (Consequential and Other Amendments) Regulations 2025

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I was not intending to speak but as there seem to be so few people here, I will just say a few words. I draw noble Lords’ attention to an organisation called the Procurement Files, which is actually very good at looking in detail at the 300,000-plus contracts on the UK government public database. When you have a glance at that, it raises a lot of questions.

Whenever the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office makes a procurement with a contractor for something happening abroad, does every single Minister sign off on it or is it done by officials? I am particularly interested because £25 million has just been agreed to one contractor to do green urban growth in Somalia. I looked at the detail of what that meant and thought, “My goodness, that is surely not a priority for what is happening in Somalia at the moment”. There is another one where it is spending half a million pounds to send 15 Porsches to the embassy in Tirana to be distributed to prisons in Albania. There are a whole range of these things.

I appreciate that most of what has been said so far is about what is happening in this country. However, if the Minister is unable to respond today, could she send me something about how these decisions are made? Quite honestly, it looks like we need some detail of the goings on, as is happening in the United States of America. I think the public would be horrified if they knew the detail of what some of their taxpayers’ money is going on.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I may be the only person here who actually took part in the Committee and Report stages of the Procurement Act, to which we are considering this SI. The Minister may remember that it was one of the worst-drafted Bills I have seen since coming into this House.

The Conservative Government introduced more than 300 amendments between Second Reading and Committee. The amendment to Clause 1 they produced in Committee was so badly drafted that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, intervened to say that it would be wonderful for the legal profession. Therefore, between Committee and Report, the Government had to produce an amendment to its amendment to Clause 1.

That was not an easy experience for the Conservative Government nor, I have to say, for the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. She began looking at the Bill as a critical Back-Bencher and then, after the resignation of her predecessor, she found herself as the Minister who had to defend the Bill she knew had many flaws. She did her best to struggle through Committee, which included three previous Conservative Ministers, who were very critical of the Bill.

In terms of transparency and simplification, we are struggling with an Act that is imperfect and very complicated. This SI does not make matters much better. I think we are all agreed that transparency and simplification are what we need to pursue, and we do not have them currently. I think we also agree that having public procurement rules which end up unintentionally favouring consultancies which are very good at writing applications and multinational companies that have the staff to write detailed applications over small and medium enterprises and others is not what you want.

The Covid experience showed the very worst of that. I recall the early contracts for setting up testing sites which were given by the Government to two multinational companies, one of which had its headquarters in Miami. Surprise, surprise, it put a lot of the local testing sites in the wrong places because they did not know much about where the best places in local communities were.