Covid Contracts: Judicial Review

William Wragg Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Edward Argar]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. He will appreciate that some of the contracts which some colleagues have alluded to remain subject to separate litigation before the courts, including some by the Good Law Project, which I will refer to as the GLP as I suspect it may come up a number of times and it might save a few minutes in my answers. I hope he will understand that I will avoid straying into something that may still be before the courts, because I do not want to show any disrespect for the legal process. He talked about the number published and where we have got to now. That will be some of the information put before the judge on Friday as per his request, but for the latest figures that are in the public domain, which were covered in the judgment and indeed more broadly, I think 100% of the contract award notices have been published, and we are up to 99% under regulation 108 on the latest figures I have. As the judge said, the overall picture does show the Secretary of State

“moving close to complete compliance.”

In respect of the right hon. Gentleman’s broader point, I would expect that Ministers in my Department—which is why I am here—as well as Ministers in the Cabinet Office, will have followed the process very closely.

[Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)]

I welcome my hon. Friend to the Dispatch Box. I hope that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was not too indisposed cooking up plans for the domestic covid passports that he had previously ruled out to attend the House today. Most fair-minded people will look at this situation in the round and perhaps give the Government the benefit of the doubt, because the judgment found against the allegation of a secret deprioritisation policy to deliberately breach procurement rules.

Further to the question from the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), can my hon. Friend the Minister give greater detail of the extent of the increase in domestic production of PPE in this country so that we have security of supply?

[Edward Argar]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I believe that officials did do the right thing in prioritising getting the PPE that we needed for our frontline, and he is also right to highlight an aspect of Justice Chamberlain’s judgment, which found there was no policy of deprioritising the publication of contract notices and data. On his final point, I said to the Father of the House that we have moved from 1% domestically produced PPE to 70% now. To put that in context, we have supplied 8.6 billion items, and we have more than 30 billion on order or being supplied at present. I suspect that as my hon. Friend is a former teacher, albeit a history teacher, his mental arithmetic is probably more rapid than mine in calculating that proportion as an absolute number, but I hope it illustrates to him just how much we have moved in the past year to utilise the fantastic resource we have in manufacturing in this country.