Contingencies Fund (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Meg Hillier and Anthony Browne

Committee of the whole House & Committee stage
Thursday 11th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I agree with the shadow Minister that we need accountability and transparency, but there is already a whole framework for public spending. As others have said, all the amendment does is introduce more bureaucracy into the Contingency Fund, without adding any value from the perspective of public accountability.

We need to learn the lessons from all this. It is an unprecedented thing that hopefully will never happen again, but we must ensure that we learn those lessons. Fortunately, there are bodies that help us learn those lessons, such as the National Audit Office, which has already done several reports into procurement.

Given that the speeches made by various Members on the Opposition Benches have been all about scoring cheap party political points, casting aspersions on the Government and Ministers and so on, I thought it was worth quoting the finding of the main National Audit Office report about the issues to which they are referring. It said:

“In the examples we examined where there were potential conflicts of interest involving ministers, we found that the ministers had properly declared their interests, and we found no evidence of their involvement in procurement decisions or contract management.”

That is the National Audit Office, which has strong powers of investigation.

I find it rather disturbing that the Opposition are trying to use this important issue just to score cheap political points. I suppose I should not; I am a new politician, and I should get used to it. What I find most concerning about the Labour party is its clear disdain for the private sector. It is using this issue to criticise private sector manufacturers. The speaker before me, the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), for example, criticised companies that were trying to produce PPE. We did not have a PPE industry in the UK at the start of this—we imported it all—and I welcome the fact that lots of companies that had not made PPE put in the effort to develop it and then supply it to the national health service. That is to be welcomed.

The drugs company in my constituency, AstraZeneca, did not do any diagnostic testing. That was not what it did; it had no arm doing that. It said, “Right, we will learn how to do this”, and it did it. It set up a whole arm to do diagnostic testing. It did that at no profit, and that is now a huge part of the testing industry in the UK. It also agreed to produce the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine at no profit to itself and to give that to the developing world on a not-for-profit basis throughout the pandemic.

That is a private sector company, as is Pfizer, which produces the Pfizer vaccine, and Moderna, which does the Moderna vaccine. All these are private sector companies coming to our rescue and to the rescue of other countries around the world when we need it, and that is very much to be welcomed. I wish the Opposition would pay tribute to the efforts of the private sector, often working in collaboration with the public sector. It is a partnership.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Anthony Browne]

I will just give way to the hon. Lady before I finish.

[Meg Hillier]

The hon. Gentleman has talked a lot about money going out into the private sector, but a lot of this contingency money has gone into the public sector. The key point is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) highlighted, that it is taxpayers’ money. Surely the hon. Gentleman agrees that we should have clear oversight and regular reporting of how taxpayers’ money is being spent.

[Anthony Browne]

I agree, and I welcome the points that the hon. Lady makes. I did say in my speech on Second Reading that I welcome the fact that the Labour party have this new-found interest in value for money, because I absolutely believe that taxpayers’ money is not the Government’s money. It is taxpayers’ money and it should be treated as such. As I said earlier, we have sufficient mechanisms for accountability and transparency. We do not need this new clause, and I will not support it.