Business of the House

Richard Thomson Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Online harms continue to be a priority of the Government, and we are firmly committed to making the UK the safest place to be online. My right hon. and hon. Friends in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Home Office are working to introduce legislation next year. We will also be publishing our full response to the online harms White Paper consultation. My hon. Friend will have further opportunity to raise this issue again during the Backbench Business debate on the regulation and prevention of online harms, and I am sure there will be other opportunities in due course.

[Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)]

The Leader of the House will be aware of the National Audit Office report on government procurement during the pandemic, which, although acknowledging the exceptional circumstances that did apply, identified many problems with the processes that had been undertaken and highlighted the need to maintain public trust in the process. I accept that there are regular general debates on covid-19 in the Chamber, but this report surely merits a more detailed exploration by Members. Will he therefore make time, in early course, to allow a full debate in this Chamber on that report and its content?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I refer to what I said earlier: there has been an extraordinary success in procurement, which had to be done quickly and everybody wanted it done quickly. For example, the vaccine taskforce has secured agreements for 350 million doses of seven leading vaccines; 300,000 people have signed up to the vaccine registry to accelerate this development; and, through Test and Trace, nearly 36 million tests have been completed and we have the capacity to test half a million a day. I believe that 80% of contracts over £120,000 have been published so far, so that there is transparency. There is always a choice; everyone knows that if they have a leak at 2 o’clock in the morning and call the plumber out, it costs more than if they book the plumber to come in three months’ time. We were in the situation of having a leak at 2 in the morning, so it was inevitably expensive.