Covid-19: Government’s Publication of Contracts Debate
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Rachel Hopkins
Main Page: Rachel Hopkins (Labour - Luton South)Department Debates - View all Rachel Hopkins's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
Covid-19: Government’s Publication of Contracts
Rachel Hopkins Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Edward Argar
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight that the decisions, as I touched on and as the PAC was told, were made following an eight-stage process run by civil servants and not Ministers. He is also right that there has been no evidence found, either by Committees of this House or the NAO, or indeed in any court cases, of any inappropriate involvement in terms of conflict of interest by Ministers. On his final point, he is absolutely right, and I know that going forward, as we always do, the Government will look to co-operate fully with the NAO in seeking to supply all and any information that it seeks, so that it can form its judgments and inform the PAC and the House of them.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab) [V]
Back in December, in the public interest, not just playing politics or sniping, I and other MPs highlighted cronyism and waste in the Government’s pandemic procurement. Three months on from that Westminster Hall debate, does the Minister agree that responding then, by increasing transparency reporting on those companies that won £1.7 billion-worth of contracts via the Government’s VIP fast lane and were 10 times more likely to receive a contract, would have been better than waiting to be taken to court?
Edward Argar
In respect of the appropriateness of contract awards and whether there are any conflicts of interest, I refer the hon. Lady to the answer that I just gave to my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). The hon. Lady talked about last December and the debate, I think, in Westminster Hall—although I could be wrong on that—where this was discussed, and I point her to the lines used by the judge in his judgment:
“The evidence as a whole suggests that the backlog arose largely in the first few months of the pandemic and that officials began to bear down on it during the autumn of 2020.”
At the time that she was speaking of—in December—the judge acknowledged that the Department and the Government were working at pace to meet their transparency requirements, so that was already being done.