Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 19 July 2023 to Question 193672 on Department of Health and Social Care: Contracts, how many contracts worth more than £1 million his Department has entered into where the (a) goods and (b) services contracted for have not been received and are no longer expected to be received in the last 12 months.

In relation to Question 193672, there were 405 contracts which were active with a value of over £1 million on the Department’s central procurement and contract management database over the last five years. To provide an answer on whether “the goods and services contracted for have not been received and are no longer expected to be received in the last five years” we would have to consult all the individual contract managers for these contracts to obtain this type of information, which would then have to be properly collated and validated.

The contract manager would need to liaise with colleagues in the Department’s Finance directorate to find the relevant purchase orders to link spend to associated contracts and then make an assessment on whether goods and services were no longer expected to be received. We estimate that this would take a minimum of two hours per contract; multiplied by the number of contracts (405) this would total 810 hours. At a cost of £25 per hour this would equate to £20,250, which exceeds the disproportionate cost threshold of £850.

Presently, the Department has 249 contracts over £1 million which were active in the last 12 months. In a similar fashion to the above, the information requested for these contracts regarding goods and services not being received or not expected to be received is not held centrally and can only be obtained at disproportionate cost.