PPE Procurement During the Pandemic

Thank you for contacting me about the Government’s handling of PPE contracts.

As you will be aware, the Good Law Project has sought to launch several judicial review proceedings into various aspects of PPE contracts awarded by government during the pandemic.

The first overarching point worth making is that Governments around the world have faced unprecedented demand for essential goods, services and work due to the Covid-19 pandemic. All public authorities in the UK, including the UK Government and devolved administrations have had to move quickly.

Being able to procure at speed has been critical in the Government’s response to Covid-19 and, at the outset of the coronavirus outbreak, it was made clear to all public authorities that they may need to procure new services with extreme urgency. For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a change to the public procurement regulations; there are well-established procedures in the Public Contracts Regulations for handling extremely urgent procurements and they have been used by a variety of public authorities including the UK Government, and devolved administrations. Other countries followed similar urgent procurement processes.

It was also made clear throughout that value for money must be achieved for taxpayers, that good commercial judgement must be used, and the details of any awards made, published in line with Government transparency guidelines.

Unfortunately, as you may be aware, the Secretary of State for Health has acknowledged that, despite intentions, not all the detail of every PPE contract awarded was published within set time frames as required by law.

While this is disappointing, I do appreciate the pressures that the Department for Health and Social Care was under last year. I was also encouraged that the Good Law Project’s contention that Government deliberately deprioritised compliance with transparency obligations was not accepted by the Court. I am pleased to say that work is well underway to tackle the backlog in publication, with the Department for Health moving towards complete compliance again.]

The National Audit Office has found that there is no evidence of ministers’ involvement in procurement decisions or contract management and that where potential conflicts arose, ministers have declared their interest properly.

In the context of public contracts, you may be interested to learn that the Government published the Green Paper on Public Procurement Rules Reform at the end of last year, which is a consultation on radical reform of the UK’s public procurement regulations. The proposals will make public procurement even more transparent by making more open data available on public contracts. The consultation is open until 10 March and can be found at the following link https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/green-paper-transforming-pu… if you would like to read more about the proposals or to contribute to the consultation.

Thank you again for contacting me.