Covid-19: Contracts and Public Inquiry

Ronnie Cowan Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP) [V]]

Any private company or public organisation worth its salt will have procurement policies in place that ensure it purchases materials that provide value for money and are fit to do the job. Those working in procurement teams will be expected to maintain high standards of propriety and ethics. Contracts to supply will be based on a mature purchasing system that has been developed over years, to ensure that both the purchaser and the supplier are satisfied with the deal, which means paying a fair price for suitable goods. That is a basic, standard guideline. Any junior procurement officer would understand that from day one.

Yet the procurement process that is within the full control of the UK Government, controller of all UK citizens’ tax, appears to have embarked on a poorly orchestrated spending spree, with many contracts being handed out in what can only be described as dubious fashion.

Recently, the Government quietly published the details of 40 PPE contracts awarded a year ago during the first wave of the pandemic. The value of those contracts was an eye-watering £4.2 billion. I accept the figures will be large when the Government hand out contracts, so what is required is transparency and the utmost integrity. I am sure we all remember our maths teacher setting problems for us and saying, “I don’t just want the answer. I want to see your workings.” The same principle applies.

It is interesting that 365 Healthcare, a trading division of Bunzl, was handed a £151 million PPE deal on 1 April 2020 without explaining why it won the contract or what was better about its bid compared with the competition. That is not good enough, especially when, as the Good Law Project revealed, a Conservative peer had lobbied for PPE contracts on behalf of Bunzl while still acting as an adviser to DHSC. Globus Shetland landed a £14 million deal in April 2020 to provide eye protection and respirators. The firm had previously donated £375,000 to the Conservative party.

The UK Government should be held up to the highest scrutiny, and they should govern in such a way that they have nothing to fear. Who created the VIP list? What were the criteria, and what was the motive behind creating such a list? Emails revealed in a hearing during the legal challenge by the Good Law Project to the direct award of PPE contracts show civil servants raising the alarm that they were drowning in VIP requests from political connections that did not have the correct certification or could not pass due diligence. One email showed a civil servant warning that, when VIPs jump to the front of the queue, there is a knock-on effect on the remaining offers of help. Why were these civil servants ignored? Who within the UK Government thought they knew better? This is not scaremongering; the facts exist if we are prepared to look for them.

In February, the Prime Minister falsely claimed that details of all PPE contracts awarded by the Government had been published and were on the record. A few weeks later, a Cabinet Office Minister doubled down on the Prime Minister’s statement, claiming that he spoke accurately. Well, they were both wrong. This leads to a lack of confidence in the Government over the pandemic. It undermines the sacrifice that millions have made and it mocks the financial hardship that so many citizens throughout the UK are facing during the pandemic. A deadly pandemic should not be an opportunity for the UK Government to line the pockets of their cronies and business acquaintances, and yet the more we scrutinise the PPE contracts awarded by the UK Government, the more the questions arise. Enormous amounts of public money have been handled without any advertising or competitive tendering process.

This simply is not good enough, and we have to understand why these mistakes have been made. To protect taxpayers’ money and prevent further PPE procurement failures, we need answers. We need a public inquiry that is free from UK Government interference. Only with good procurement practice, which means learning from mistakes, can we safeguard the lives of the public and our highly valued healthcare workers, and that comes from scrutiny of and transparency from the UK Government.