Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many contracts his Department has awarded to companies without a tendering process in the last 12 months; which companies those contracts were with; and what services those contracts were for.

Contracting authorities are allowed to procure goods, services and works with extreme urgency in exceptional circumstances under the Public Contract Regulations 2015. These include a direct award under which authorities may enter into contracts without competing or advertising the requirement. The great majority of contracts placed by the Department were awarded under this route.

As of the beginning of November 2020, 937 contracts worth an estimated £17.8 billion have been awarded by the Department and its executive agencies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for a wide range of products and services including personal protective equipment (PPE), the Test and Trace initiative, ventilators, IT, logistics and medicines etc.