Business of the House

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Alan Campbell

Thursday 16th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Campbell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to support Fulwell community library and the National Year of Reading, and I pay tribute to Richard Beck and all the others who are helping to make these things possible. Public libraries open up opportunities for everyone to access information and knowledge, and provide vital community spaces. We are investing £1.5 billion to save more than 1,000 local museums, art venues, libraries and heritage sites, ensuring access to culture for everyone. This is a particularly exciting time for my hon. Friend’s city, not least because we will be enjoying European football next season.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

The midland main line is in crisis. More than a quarter of our trains are being cancelled or are crazily late, and we find that even if people can get on, they will have to stand because so many are short form. The trains are falling apart; the air conditioning, toilets and doors do not work, and the windows are blown. We need a debate on this, because this happened because Department for Transport officials allowed our trains to be sent somewhere else in the country, even though they knew that our new trains were not going to arrive on time. My constituents want to know when the compensation will come, and whether they will get trains over the summer to stop this crisis getting worse, because at the moment, the Department is in denial. We need some proper answers.

[Sir Alan Campbell]

I am sorry to hear of the situation that the hon. Gentleman raises. I will take that back to ministerial colleagues and see if we can get an update. Should he seek a meeting with Ministers, I would be happy to arrange it.

Government PPE Contracts

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Alan Campbell

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien]

What did the hon. Member for Brent Central say there? [Interruption.] No, she does not want to repeat it.

Let me be clear, Madam Deputy Speaker: at every point in the procurement process, the process is rightly run by our brilliant commercial professionals. Ministers are not involved in the procurement process; Ministers are not involved in the value of contracts. Ministers are not involved in the scope of contracts, and Ministers are not involved in the length of contracts. That is something echoed by the National Audit Office, whose report concluded that the Ministers had properly declared their interests and that there was

“no evidence of their involvement in procurement decisions or contract management”.

The role of Ministers was exactly what we would expect. Approaches from suppliers were passed on to civil servants for an independent assessment. Let us again look at the scale of the effort: 19,000 companies made offers, around 430 were processed through the high-priority group, and only 12% of those resulted in a contract for 51 firms. That group was primarily about managing the many, many requests that were coming in to Ministers from people across the House and from people across the country who were desperate to help with that national challenge of getting more PPE, and there had to be a way of dealing with them. To be clear, due diligence was carried out on every single company, financial accountability sat with a senior civil servant, all procurement decisions were taken by civil servants, and a team of more than 400 civil servants processed referrals and undertook due diligence checks. It was a huge operation run by the civil service, and I thank them for their work in getting our NHS the PPE that it needed.

Let me be clear, I will not stand here and say that there are not any lessons to be learned; of course there are. But we should be clear about what those lessons are. Despite the global race to get PPE, only 3% of the materials sourced were fit for purpose, but we have built more resilient supply chains. We are implementing the recommendations of the Boardman review of pandemic procurement in full. I have mentioned the growth of UK procurement of face masks and of vaccines.

In closing, I wish to thank all of those who have been involved in this important conversation. We should be rightly proud of what was achieved during those dark and difficult days at the start of the pandemic, operating in conditions of considerable uncertainty. We were in a situation where, literally, there was gazumping going on. If people did not turn up with the cash, things were removed that they had bought from the warehouses. That was the global race that we were in to source these things. The 400-strong team of civil servants who led this process did a remarkable job from a standing start of sourcing the goods that we needed.

During this debate, we have heard a number of deliberate obfuscations of the different things that Ministers and officials do. To be clear, all of these decisions went through an eight-stage forensic process that was run entirely by officials and it did not get anyone a contract to go into this high-priority group. It was simply about managing the sheer number of bids for contracts that were coming in to people across this House. At the time, although memories are very short and the barracking on this continued—

[Sir Alan Campbell (Tynemouth) (Lab)]

claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).

Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.

Question agreed to.

Main Question accordingly put and agreed to.