Randox Covid Contracts

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

I was not planning to speak in this debate, but I have a few remarks I would like to make. As one of the co-chairs of the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, I take these kinds of accusations very seriously, and as someone who has served on the Public Accounts Committee, I have done my fair share of time looking at how Government procurement works. There are some very serious questions that need very serious and comprehensive answers, but we have to be pretty generous in spirit to the situation that the Government found themselves in back in March 2020. We had a pandemic of a new virus. We did not have anything like the testing capacity or the PPE in stock that we needed, and we had to try to find solutions to those things quickly. I just do not think it would have been feasible in that situation for every normal process to have been carried out for the Government to have delivered what people had every right to expect them to be trying to deliver. We should look at it generously and not expect to see every i dotted and every t crossed, as we would normally expect.

That is not to say we should expect there to be no process at all, and the Government should have been cognisant that if they were going through a rapid emergency process, there were very great risks that things could go wrong and money could be wasted, with the possibility of overpayments, buying from people who could not deliver, and not ending up with the right amount of stuff. That heightened the risk and should have created more sensitivity around process to ensure that such accusations could not be made retrospectively.

We should have seen the Government try to be as transparent as possible about what happened, what was bought, what was paid and about who introduced who and how. That is where the Government have gone wrong at the end of this process. I can accept that mistakes were bound to be made at the start. I can probably accept that we probably wasted money, paid too much, paid the wrong people and things went wrong. In the middle of this panic, if I knew someone who I could trust and who I thought could deliver, I may well have pushed them forward more than I would ever normally do. I can accept all that may have happened, but now—we are 18 months on from that point—let us publish everything we feasibly can, and let us be as clear as we possibly can about what happened and why.

I suspect that there is not actually much to see here. I suspect we will find things that are embarrassing and things that went wrong, but I do not think we will find much evidence of corruption. However, if there is any, let us get it out there, see it, deal with the people who did it, get the price of it and then let us move on from this. I do not see why we are trying to hide things now and resisting publication, so I will support this motion if there is a vote later. May I urge the Government, on all the other things and all the other requests, just to publish it and get it out there? I am sure there is nothing to see, and I am not sure how it helps to resist all this now. Let us just do it. When we see a scandal involving a former Member of this House and the same company, it is just not prudent to think that we can not publish everything involved in that. I hope—I sincerely hope—that there is nothing there to see, but let us just be clear about it.

I think my final advice to the Government would be that the only way we will move on from these issues and clear the stench, which I am sure is unfounded, is transparency. Just publish everything, even if it is embarrassing, even if we would not normally do it and even if there were commercial restrictions we would not normally have. I think those are all trumped in this situation because we could not have the normal procedures, but we have to have a different process now. Let us be open, let us publish it and let us move on from all of this.