Covid-19: Contracts and Public Inquiry

Owen Thompson Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

It is kind of a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan). His tieless, sedentary, relaxed demeanour contrasted somewhat with the demeanour of the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), who I admire and respect, because when I intervened on him and raised the issue of the very widespread levels of covid currently pertaining in Scotland, it is fair to say that he did not react with what I would describe as calm statesmanship.

Only two days ago, The Scotsman, no less, had as one of its headlines the question, “Why does Scotland have the highest covid rates in Europe?” That is a fundamental question.

[Owen Thompson (Midlothian) (SNP)]

indicated dissent.

[James Cartlidge]

If the hon. Gentleman wishes to intervene and defend that, he is more than welcome to the chance. He will not defend it; well, there is a surprise. [Interruption.] Come on then, why does Scotland have the highest rates in Europe?

[Owen Thompson]

Of course, The Scotsman is well known to be a great supporter of the Scottish National party; the hon. Gentleman might want to have a look at that. The Scottish Government do not have control of our borders. The delta variant has come in and has created so many of these cases. That is outwith the control of the Scottish Government, who are doing everything they possibly can to bring them down.

[James Cartlidge]

That is unbelievable. Scotland has the highest covid rates in Europe. The SNP is governing in Scotland and it will take not a shred of responsibility for this situation.

[Owen Thompson]

rose—

[James Cartlidge]

I might give the hon. Gentleman another turn, but let us just put some facts on the table.

In June, 2,000 people in Scotland who tested positive for covid had attended a Euro 2021 event. I am no killjoy. I am quite happy that they attended. I will be attending a Euro 2021 event tonight to watch England vs Denmark. I am quite happy that many thousands of Scots made the journey to London to watch that game, in which their team performed admirably—far better than we did. The idea that the Scottish Government had no power in this matter is ludicrous. If they really thought that this variant was such a concern and that we should have closed the borders, they should not have allowed people to come down in their thousands. The evidence shows that those people are now super-spreaders of covid in Scotland. The hon. Gentleman should not pretend that the Scottish Government had no power in this matter.

Having said all that, I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, who has now returned to the Chamber, for introducing this debate about covid contracts, because it gives me the opportunity to talk about two covid contracts that are far more important than all the other guff we have heard today. Those contracts are, first, the contract that this Government—indeed, my right hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock)—signed with AstraZeneca to procure a vaccine, along with all the other ones that we took a risk on procuring before the rest of the EU. That has brought liberty to millions and saved the lives of thousands, for which we should all be grateful.

The second contract is one that we will not find a copy of, and there was no procurement for it, but again it is of fundamental importance: it is the social contract that exists between the Government and the governed on the basis of when we are expected to give up our precious rights because an emergency exists and when—the key question for me—those rights should be returned because the emergency has passed: a fundamental point given the Prime Minister’s statement on Monday.

The first contract was the generic process through which the UK Department of Health and Social Care negotiated contracts for those vaccines and delivered them in a way exceeding almost all other major nations, delivering millions and millions of doses. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Angus (Dave Doogan) for saying in his intervention that that was the one thing the Government got right, but, boy, that one thing is more important than anything else: it is the way out of the mess; it is the way we get out of lockdown; it is the ways we save millions of lives. And it is not just lives in the United Kingdom that are being saved; it is not just lives in every corner of this precious Union. The AstraZeneca vaccine contract was negotiated so it would be produced at cost. The significance of that enormous contractual point is that the vaccine has been spread around the developing world. We have seen 400 million Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines go into the arms of the poorest in the world. We should be incredibly proud of that. This Government have an incredibly honourable record in what has passed.

Covid was one of the greatest crises the world has faced; it was completely unprecedented, and every time we have had to make a choice we have been between a rock and a hard place, but the only way out of it, as we all knew, was through vaccines, and we made the right call at the right time, which no other Government in Europe made at that point, and we should be proud of that contract, and it is far more important than all the other stuff mentioned today.

On the second point, the social contract, this is my first opportunity to respond to the enormous announcement we heard on Monday—one I am so grateful for—that we will be returning to normal, restoring our precious freedoms. I believe in the social contract; it is implicit—we all have our own interpretation of it—but at its heart must be the idea that Government have certain powers but they can only use them in exceptional circumstances, if those circumstances are truly an emergency.

Tonight, as I said, thousands—millions—of people around part of the Union will be going to watch a football match. They will be crowded in pubs. The idea that we are still in an emergency is for the birds, and that is because of medical science, and I am profoundly grateful; it is because of the first part of the contract that I spoke about, but because of that we must start taking decisions that restore freedom and return this country back to normal.

I understand that some people are nervous, because I have had emails from constituents who voted in all ways for all parties—and in all ways in the referendum, in case anyone tries to make that link. Some people are still nervous; they worry and think we should still have to wear masks after 19 July and that the Government should still keep measures on. I have no idea where the Labour party stands on this; as far as I can see, they want us to remain in lockdown, but, as the Prime Minister said, if not now, when? Let me answer that: if not now, it is never, because the whole point of the social contract is that if we allow the state to keep that power for too long, it will not come back. The default disposition of the state must be that its citizens are free and that they are only not free in exceptional circumstances, and I believe those circumstances have now passed, and that is because of the vaccine; there are still high numbers of cases, but they are generally not resulting in significant ill health, and because of that we can unlock this lock- down.

--- Later in debate ---

[Owen Thompson (Midlothian) (SNP)]

I associate myself with some of the comments made by the hon. Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford), particularly in relation to the work being done by his twin brother and all those working on the frontline, for which we all share a great deal of respect.

I am delighted that my party has made time available today to discuss the scandal of the way in which covid-19 emergency contracts have been dished out by this Government. We have seen the Prime Minister make an artform of stripping away the processes that protect fairness and transparency, all under the cover of the pandemic. The justification has tended to be the same across the board—it has to be done in a hurry—but how far can that stretch?

I have no doubt that procuring goods at speed and scale was a challenge, and there are clearly things that had to be done to make sure it could be undertaken, but justifying the bypassing of due process in the early days is not a catch-all or an excuse for the growing list of questionable contract decisions that were not open to a competitive tender process.

The sense of right and wrong did not go out of the window when the covid virus came in. There must always be time for proper scrutiny of money spent from the public purse, and the Government must always be available to answer for their decisions. Perhaps the Government will tell us today whether the VIP channels that were so roundly criticised earlier in the pandemic are still operating today, who knew about them, who was on them or where we can find out more about them. It is only through the National Audit Office that we know the fast-track channels existed and that they vastly increased the chances of successfully landing a contract. Of over 15,000 suppliers, just 400 went through the VIP lane and one in 10 of them received a contract, compared with 0.7% of those that went through normal channels. I have plenty of talented and deserving constituents in Midlothian who would have been delighted to have that opportunity to have a leg up through a VIP channel and get a comfy Government contract, but that door was not open to them: it stayed firmly shut, unless a person happened to rub shoulders with the right people in the corridors of power. Details of those channels were certainly not advertised in the Government’s guidance, and many people—including medical professionals with invaluable experience of the NHS—were not even aware that they existed.

There is room for a fast track; I do not deny that. If it is an emergency, we need to look at new ways of doing things, but it is absolutely absurd that having connections to a party of Government is the criterion that is required to be on that fast-track list. This should slow things down, not get a person to the front of the queue. There are too many serious allegations of cronyism coming out now for this to be simply brushed aside or written off as a mere coincidence. Transparency International UK has so far found contracts worth over £3.7 billion—one in five—between February and November 2020 that raised red flags. According to its report, the Government displayed

“apparent systemic biases in the award of PPE contracts that favoured those with political connections to the party of government in Westminster”.

There is an ever-growing roll call of examples of apparent cronyism coming from the excellent investigative journalism of organisations such as Byline Times, openDemocracy and others, and we have already seen successful litigation from the Good Law Project over delays in publishing contract award notices. The more we dig, the dirtier it looks, and the emergency excuse for bypassing due process begins to wear a little thin when it is used for contracts with little to do with frontline emergency, such as the £500,000 awarded illegally to Public First—old colleagues and pals of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Dominic Cummings, of course.

Nor does the speed argument explain those early contracts being given to companies with such little experience in the field, when a wealth of other suppliers had put offers in. Can the Government tell us now why crucial contracts for life-saving protection went to a Florida-based jewellery company, or to a wholesaler of sweets with no obvious experience of supplying PPE? What made the tiny vermin control operation PestFix, valued at just £19,000, the best-placed company to provide a vital £32 million for isolation suits, and why did the former Health Secretary’s neighbour and pub landlord get a £30 million contract for producing plastic vials following a few chats on WhatsApp? The Greensill scandal and the Dyson scandal demonstrate that this is a Government that are overseeing a culture of taxpayers’ money being dished out through informal back channels removed from public scrutiny. If the Government have nothing to hide, I would again ask why they did not back my Ministerial Interests (Emergency Powers) Bill in the last term of this Parliament. We accept the need for speed, but that does not mean we cannot ask questions after the event.

Week after week at business questions, I have requested Government time to debate many of these serious concerns about the openness and transparency of the Government, but those concerns are dismissed. In one response, the Leader of the House put on his best poker face and assured me that

“We have in this country one of the most honest public sectors of any country in the world.”—[Official Report, 25 February 2021; Vol. 689, c. 1096.]

It is unfortunate that that does not always appear to extend to all within Government. If that is the case, the public sector is badly being let down by the Government and their culture of secrecy. This Government claim that they cannot find support for the 3 million excluded, nor can they afford to pay a decent pay rise to the NHS, yet they found a staggering, jaw-dropping £37 billion for private companies with connections to power to run a test and protect system that does not yet work properly, with consultants earning £1,000 a day. This is a system in which we now know—thanks, again, to the efforts of the Good Law Project—that yet another VIP lane existed. It is an absolute scandal.

The Government may claim that people do not care about these contracts issues because they do not affect them, but they do: people see what is going on, and they will be scunnered by it all. When faith and trust in democracy is lost, we are all lost. If the Government are innocent on all charges—except, of course, the ones on which they have already been found guilty—they need the public inquiry into covid contracts to press ahead now, not next year after the heat has gone from the issue. We need to have clear channels through which to scrutinise Government actions and hold the Executive to account. Standards in public life are the foundation on which democratic institutions are built, and we need systems with which to root out anyone in public office who puts profit for themselves, their partners or their pals before the public good. If corruption is ignored, it will fester: the small cracks will become fissures, and the very foundations of our democracy will crumble.

The Government remain far too blasé in response to allegations of cronyism and this cannot go unchecked. Like the ancient Romans, perhaps they still believe themselves to be untouchable and answering to no one, especially not those outwith their VIP circles, but if they let the rot set in, the public will soon lose trust in their leadership. If they do not stand up for decency, democracy and high standards in public life, we may be watching our current modern-day Nero see the end.