EU Exit Preparations: Ferry Contracts

John Bercow Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. There has been a certain amount of frivolity on the matter of attendance at the debate, but perhaps we can now return to the theme of the debate rather than having a constant competition as to who can be more amusing at others’ expense on the matter of attendance.

[Alan Brown]

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I shall return to the substantive point of procurement. I touched earlier on rail franchising. The Secretary of State always says that he believes in competition. If he believes in competition, why did he have this secretive direct negotiating process? What is competitive about that? How could that provide value for money for the taxpayer? Will he come to the Dispatch Box and justify the expenditure and give us a detailed rationale of how he has managed to provide any value for money for the taxpayer in this entire process?

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[Alan Brown]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Gentleman must confine himself to the subject matter of today’s debate, the terms of which have been specified and which the Secretary of State will answer. This cannot be a general ad hominem attack on the Secretary of State or a replay of other matters that happened at an earlier point in the Secretary of State’s career to which Members want to object.

[Alan Brown]

I will take your guidance, Mr Speaker, and perhaps spare the Transport Secretary any more of his litany of failures.

The right hon. Gentleman has already survived what was effectively a vote of no confidence, but I have several times called for him to be sacked, as has the shadow Transport Secretary, and he should do the right thing and step aside. It is abundantly clear that his handling of this shambles has been truly shameful. I will be interested to hear what he says at the Dispatch Box, but I have no confidence in his handling of this matter and he really should think about walking.

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[Hon. Members]

Oh.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Look, I understand passions are high, but the hon. and learned Lady must not say that the Secretary of State is not telling the truth, because that—[Interruption.] Order. That is an imputation of dishonesty. The hon. and learned Lady may think that the Secretary of State is wrong, but I am afraid before the debate proceeds further she must withdraw that charge.

[Joanna Cherry]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

I am not debating it.

[Joanna Cherry]

I will withdraw it and I will speak later in full.

[Mr Speaker]

I say to the hon. and learned Lady that I am chairing this debate. The hon. and learned Lady will speak in full, or otherwise, if and when she catches the eye of the Chair. Thank you.

[Chris Grayling]

Mr Speaker, I simply reiterate: the settlement that we have reached with Eurotunnel is going to pay for improved facilities at the border, to improve flow, to make sure that our border through the tunnel works more smoothly in future, particularly in the post-Brexit world. That is a simple, factual point about the settlement that has been reached.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) did not actually put in to speak.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

I have bobbed.

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Gentleman may have bobbed, but I have just told him—

[Kevin Foster]

rose—

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[Mr Speaker]

Sit down. The hon. Gentleman did not put in to speak. He is signalling that he wishes to speak, and that—[Interruption.] If he leaves me to make the judgment and tell him what the situation is, he will benefit from the instruction that I am about to give him. Working on the basis of an informal time limit, it would be helpful if colleagues did not exceed 12 minutes each. I call Mr Kevin Foster.

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[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Is it customary for the Member who is speaking to provoke a Minister into looking at her directly and then to say that he is somehow interrupting her. It seems to me it would be far better if the hon. and learned Lady went on addressing the Chair and left the Minister to listen, like the rest of us.

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Gentleman has his own interpretation of the chronology of events, which those attending to observe our proceedings can make a judgment about for themselves, and that is one point of view. If I may say so, there is another point of view, which is that the hon. and learned Lady was somewhat disquieted, not to say mildly irritated, by the junior Minister’s evident fascination with the contents of his electronic device. It might be thought courteous not to be focusing intently on the said contents when a Member is addressing the House. I hope the hon. Gentleman will not take offence when I say that he is in the end a very loyal sort of person, and it is not terribly surprising that he should spring to the defence of his ministerial colleague and fellow parliamentarian. It was very gracious of him and a nice try.

[Joanna Cherry]

It may have been a nice try, but I am not going to leave this one alone. I want to know how much of that £33 million will be repaid in the event of there being a deal. I think I know the answer: it will be nil. I want to know whether there was any legal agreement that any amount of that £33 million was to be spent on improved security, and if so, to what extent. I will not be leaving those issues alone either today or in the future.

I was the first person, to my knowledge, to raise this issue on the Floor of the House or in Committee earlier this year. When I got hold of a copy of the contract with Seaborne Freight, which was readily available on the internet, I, like any lawyer worth their salt, looked up the public contracts regulations and realised that it looked very much as though the Government had avoided the competitive tendering process that they are bound to carry out under law.

That is why I raised this issue with the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union in the Chamber on 7 January. I am going to go through the chronology because I want to make the point that I have raised at least half a dozen times the question of what was the urgent or unforeseeable event that justified there not being a competitive tender, and that on no occasion have I received the answer that has been given today by the Secretary of State for Transport that it was to do with a decision taken collectively by the Government last autumn to improve the supply of medicines in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The very first time I heard such an explanation was on the television at the weekend, when the Secretary of State for Health used it, and he of course used it again yesterday. However, it is very odd—again, this informs my puzzlement and frustration earlier this afternoon—that we have never heard that explanation before.

Let me go through the chronology. On 7 January in this Chamber, I asked the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union why the contract with Seaborne Freight had proceeded under the negotiated procurement procedure without prior publication—that is to say, not competitively—because it seems to me that it must have been foreseeable for quite a long time that there might be a no-deal situation and it was therefore hard to say that no deal had come out of the blue and was urgent or unforeseeable. I received the usual non-answer from the Secretary of State. I will not bore hon. Members with the contents of the answer—they can look it up in Hansard—but there is nothing about a requirement to prepare for the urgent supply of medicine and, indeed, no kind of explanation at all.

The following day, 8 January, I raised the same point with the Secretary of State for Transport on the Floor of the House. I said I was concerned about the legality of the procurement process, that I had a copy of the contract notice and that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) reminded the House earlier that day, no deal has always been a possibility because the Prime Minister said right at the beginning that no deal is better than a bad deal. I asked the Secretary of State what the urgency was and whether the Government had set aside any funds in the event of legal action. I got a non-answer, other than to say it was a “matter of extreme urgency”, and there was no reference to the supply of medicine.

The following day, 9 January, I raised the matter in some detail with the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), at a question and answer session before the Exiting the European Union Committee. I am proud to say that the segment where I questioned him went viral on the internet. I asked him a number of times to tell the Committee what the urgent and unforeseeable event was that justified these contracts not going out to competitive tender, and he was unable to tell me.

If the explanation that it had been a collective decision by the UK Government to put these contracts out non-competitively to secure the supply of medicines, I would have expected the Minister in charge of no-deal planning at the Department for Exiting the European Union to know that. The fact that he did not know and, under sustained questioning, did not mention it does raise a suspicion in my mind that it is an explanation that has been invented after the fact, rather than an explanation that has always been the case.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. There are two remaining speakers. Just as a helpful guide to both hon. Members, the average length of Back-Bench speeches has been approximately 10 minutes. Neither hon. Member need feel a driving ambition to exceed that very satisfactory self-imposed time constraint.

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[Chris Grayling]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I would just like to inform the House that the annex containing the requirements for Eurotunnel to spend money on improvements at the borders has now been published on the Government website.

[Mr Speaker]

That is an extremely helpful point of order from the right hon. Gentleman, and I thank him. It is by way of being a public information notice and I take it very much in that spirit.