Conduct of the Right Hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip

Matt Hancock Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds]

I will, of course, respond to the hon. Member’s comments because, just as I said to his hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson), when the Labour party finds action that is inappropriate, we act. We have changed our systems. We have made sure that we comply with what is required of us. If the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) wishes to defend his party happily allowing a Member who has been found to have engaged in sexual harassment to be back on its Benches, that is up to him. It is his decision.

In that foreword on standards, again, the Prime Minister states that there should be:

“No misuse of taxpayer money”—

that, from a Prime Minister who gave us the VIP lane for personal protective equipment contracts, with £3.5 billion of taxpayers’ money given to party donors and Conservative cronies who were recommended by Conservative Ministers, MPs and Downing Street officials. Those contracts so often failed to deliver while our nurses and care workers struggled and while many British firms’ offers of help were passed over.

[Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Con)]

Is the hon. Lady really denigrating the efforts to get hold of PPE, and does she not know the history? The Labour party also put forward proposals and Labour party members and Labour donors also helped in that huge effort to get PPE.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am slightly surprised to hear that the right hon. Member wishes to draw attention to what took place in that regard—

[Matt Hancock]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Anneliese Dodds]

No, because I will respond to the right hon. Member’s point. He asked whether I was aware that Labour MPs and others were making recommendations. I am absolutely aware, because we were all trying to do that to ensure that we had the best response, but the difference was that they were not entered into that VIP lane. One can see that in the list of firms that was recently published. If he wants to state that among that list, there were Labour MPs’ names rather than those of his Conservative colleagues, he must have been looking at a very different list from me.

[Matt Hancock]

I am grateful for the opportunity to set the record straight; I hope that after I speak, she will withdraw those comments and that the Labour party will no longer use that argument. The contract with Excalibur Healthcare Services, which is run by a Labour donor, was introduced from a Labour MP through me. The very good man who runs Excalibur Healthcare, in fact, helped to launch the Labour party’s science manifesto in 2005, so she can now withdraw the allegations. What she should say is a big “thank you” to everybody who helped to get PPE when it was so badly needed.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I really regret the fact that instead of responsibility being taken and it being stated that the system will be changed for the future, we are seeing an attempt to rewrite history. I was not the one who stated that Conservative-related actors were more likely to obtain contracts; the National Audit Office pointed it out. Yes, Labour figures were making recommendations to have a better response, as I mentioned a moment ago, but in doing so we were focused on those who could genuinely aid our response. We were not focused on pub landlords, for example, or on others who had had no prior experience in the field.

[Matt Hancock]

rose—

[Anneliese Dodds]

I do not want to upset the House, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I am very happy to take another intervention if you do not mind.

[Matt Hancock]

If I may, I will set the record straight on one further point. I have heard this point about the pub landlord; I just want to tell the hon. Lady and the House and put it formally on the record—after which I hope that the Labour party will stop this slur—that the gentleman in question never got or applied for a contract from the Government or the NHS at all. That is a fabrication pushed by the Labour party—it is a load of rubbish. What was happening, however, was that a huge range of people were helping out with the national effort, including members of the Labour party.

[Dawn Butler]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Anneliese Dodds]

It is indeed the case that facts have been laid out in courts of law; they stand for themselves.

I have to say that at a time when our national health service and our care workers and volunteers up and down the country are yet again supporting the covid effort, I think that it is incredibly important that this Government be transparent. [Hon. Members: “Withdraw!”] I will not withdraw what I have said, but I hope that the Conservative Government will withdraw what they have said about not being transparent—a point that I will come to in a moment.

The foreword written by the Prime Minister says that there will be

“no actual or perceived conflicts of interest”.

Sadly, we know that there have been so many. Peerages have apparently been handed out to anyone who can meet the £3 million entrance charge and agree to a stint as Conservative party treasurer. David Cameron and Lex Greensill were given the run of Whitehall to beg for access to hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. More than half a billion pounds in testing contracts was handed over to a company advised by a Conservative former Minister, without competition and behind closed doors, with a second contract dished out to Randox Laboratories after it had failed to deliver on the first.

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock) for the comments that he has just made. If he believes in transparency—

[Matt Hancock]

And in facts.

[Anneliese Dodds]

Indeed. Well, transparency reveals facts, does it not? I therefore hope that he will encourage his Government to do what this House stated only two weeks ago that they must: publish the minutes from the meeting between Lord Bethell, Owen Paterson and Randox over the award of money-spinning contracts. Parliament decided that that must happen two weeks ago, and the Deputy Speaker reminded Ministers to do it in a timely fashion last week, but they are still dragging their feet. They say that they cannot possibly make the minutes public for another two months. That seems like rather a long time in which to establish the facts, does it not?

If those vital minutes simply do not exist, Ministers should do the right thing and come clean about it here today, rather than pretending to spend the next two months looking for them. I offer the Minister, and indeed those sitting on his Benches, the chance to do that right now. I offer them the chance to intervene and let us know whether the minutes exist or not. No one is meeting my gaze, so it seems clear that we shall have to wait until the end of January to know what is happening about those minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Con)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I wish you and the whole House a happy St Andrew’s day. I have come to this debate today because it strikes me that the SNP motion is pitiful politicking and that the people of Scotland deserve better. They want to see real solutions to real problems. Unfortunately, it is part of a pattern for the SNP to put ideological purity ahead of the interests of the people of Scotland. We heard that from its leader here, the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), who argued that independence was not the most important thing on the minds of the people of Scotland, but we know why SNP Members have brought this debate to the House today: it is merely so that they can find another way to make the argument for independence, which they lost so comprehensively when it was put to the people of Scotland five years ago.

Today, SNP Members are calling for the censure of the Prime Minister, but what they should be doing is working to improve the lives of the people of Scotland. The flop of a speech from the right hon. Gentleman demonstrated that they are losing this argument. He read out a list of allegations that were comprehensively demolished by the Minister in his excellent speech. At the heart of those allegations was that the Prime Minister is ignoring advice, but the problem with the SNP is that it ignores not only advice but the decisions of the people of Scotland and this country in every referendum that it has seen. The problem is that the SNP has not seen a referendum result that it likes, so it ignores the results and asks for a rematch.

On the substance, I will not go into the SNP’s failures in education, but Scotland once had the finest education system in the world. The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber did not even mention covid-19. I will not dwell on the huge economic cost of independence, but one piece of evidence from the Prime Minister’s tenure that completely undermines the SNP’s case is the vaccine programme. Because SNP Members are losing the argument on substance, they focus instead on politicking. Conceived through UK-funded scientific work involving researchers from universities across the UK, and indeed across the world, the Oxford vaccine is a UK success that shows Britain at her best.

Critically, we bought vaccines for the whole of the UK so that everybody in Scotland and the rest of the UK were the first in the world to access them. Even better, it was a joint effort. People who are Scottish and British and in this Union get the best of both worlds: a UK vaccine delivered locally by the NHS in Scotland, working with local councils, and we could bring in the British Army when we needed reinforcements. It was a huge team effort. All four nations rolled out the vaccine together.

I pay tribute to my then Scottish opposite number, Jeane Freeman. She deserves plaudits for putting pragmatism ahead of ideology. Her only problem was when the First Minister of Scotland would get involved and cause all sorts of problems by trying to politic with the programme instead of delivering the programme.

Finally, why do I, as an English MP, care about this? It is because our Union brings together the best for Scotland, England and the United Kingdom, and for my constituents, too. We should get away from this politicking and concentrate on the things that really matter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

First, Madam Deputy Speaker, I wish you, and all right hon. and hon. Members of this House, a very happy St Andrew’s Day. He is by far and away the best saint, in my humble opinion. But it has not been a very happy St Andrew’s Day for many of my constituents because, as we sit here debating this today, thousands of them remain without power, lights, heating or internet connectivity as a result of Storm Arwen. Hundreds remain without water—

[Matt Hancock]

Does my hon. Friend not think that it would be a better use of time to debate that rather than this motion?

[Andrew Bowie]

I thank my right hon. Friend for asking that question, because I do think that. I am angry that, while constituents of mine—[Interruption.] SNP Members might heckle and make light of the fact that Scots are freezing in their homes and have no access to services at this time, but I am angry that we are here debating this when people in Finzean, Strachan, Kincardine O’Neil and many other places in my constituency are dealing with a catastrophe and a crisis. It was not outwith the realms of possibility for the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) to table a motion for today to debate how the Scottish and UK Governments might work together to support all those across the UK who have been affected by Storm Arwen, but we are here debating this motion. Indeed, as of earlier this afternoon, the First Minister of Scotland—Scotland’s most prolific social media activist, it would seem—had yet to post any comment—