By John Pickard
The stink around the awarding of massive public contracts to the Tories’ political friends is getting thicker and more nauseating by the day. There is a miasma of corruption, nepotism and cronyism surrounding this government, and it is costing the taxpayers billions of pounds.
Sections of the press like the Guardian, the Financial Times and even the pro-Tory BBC have taken up the issue of dodgy PPE contracts, and The Good Law Project has for several weeks been seeking a judicial review. Now, at last, even the official government watchdog, the Audit Commission, has been obliged to add its own, admittedly mild, rebuke to the government.
This week, in an editorial in the British Medical Journal, that prestigious publication castigated the government’s approach to health procurement. “When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex”, it said, “people die.” Indeed, and according to the National Statistical Office, the total number of deaths due to Covid this year – by comparison to the average for the same period in the previous five years – is over 71,000. These are unnecessary deaths and have to be put down to decades of running down the NHS to a skeleton service and to the privatisation and profiteering that is rife in that sector.
Government lying about ‘following the science’
In the course of this pandemic, the British Medical Journal editorial continued, “Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.”
It confirms what we have said, that the government has been blatantly lying about “following the science”. In reality, as the BMJ argues, they have been suppressing the science, by stifling or skewing SAGE deliberations, withholding publication of critical reports, and making the most outrageous and unsubstantiated promises – like operation ‘Moonshot’ – that have no basis in science at all.
But perhaps the most obvious issue about which the BMJ complains is the simple and glaringly one of corruption in procurement, what the Financial Times, in an editorial on November 16, called “the government’s willingness to fight Covid-19 with an open cheque book”. Not so much an open cheque book as splashing the cash, and on a monumental scale. And largely in the interests of the friends of the Tory Party.
Millions of unsuitable tests purchased
Take the case of the government procuring of an antibody test, one that, according to the BMJ, “in the real world…falls well short of performance claims made by its manufacturers.” The government was committed to buying a million of these tests, without proper scrutiny of its medical value. When researchers from Public Health England (PHE) and other collaborators wanted to publish their study findings on this test, they were blocked by the Health Department and the Prime Minister’s Office. PHE also (unsuccessfully) tried to block the BMJ publication of a research paper on the test.
“The UK’s pandemic response”, the BMJ concludes, “relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines. Government appointees are able to ignore or cherry pick science—another form of misuse—and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates.”
1,600 contracts still not published
There are numerous instances of companies, without any connections to medical or health procurement in the past, being given massive contracts by the Tories. What is worse is that many of the contracts have been signed without any competitive tendering or any details published, as they are legally obliged to be. In fact, according to the Financial Times, there are over 1,600 contracts signed between March and July that have not been published.
There is the notorious case of PestFix, a company with only £18,000 of fixed assets and with no previous experience providing PPE to the NHS, but which was awarded a total of eleven contracts, and so far, the Government has only published the details of one of them. So that’s £350m of contracts for PPE, awarded to a pest controller. If that’s not profiteering, nothing is.
Middle-men awarded ‘lucrative’ deals
The newest revelation, thanks to a BBC inquiry is that of a businessman who acted as a go-between to secure protective garments for NHS staff in the coronavirus pandemic and who was paid £21m for the privilege. This would not have become public knowledge were it not for the details of his contracts being submitted in a court case in the USA.
So here we have a situation where a jewellery-designer (no, really, you couldn’t make this up) become a procurer for NHS equipment and makes almost as much money for each part of the contract as the government pays for the equipment. Deals, described by the court in Miami as “lucrative”, this being the understatement of the year. It has been revealed that the government has taken out a total of £200m worth of contracts to this erstwhile designer of trinkets, none of which were put out to competitive tendering. If that is not the rotten stink of corruption, then nothing is.
HSE ‘leaned on’ to sanction PPE
It is bad enough that multimillionaires are being made out of profiteering from Covid, but there are no guarantees that the PPE upon which NHS and care staff depend is even reliable. According to another BBC report the Health and Safety Executive responsible for approving the quality of PPE, was “leaned on by the government to make factually incorrect statements” about the quality of PPE purchased earlier in the pandemic. In August it was revealed that fifty million masks procured by the NHS were not fit for purpose and had to be binned.
DHSC spokespersons, of course, have issued the usual robotic replies about the department “working tirelessly”, etc, etc. In fact, the only thing they are “working tirelessly” to do is to enrich a handful of companies and individuals at the expense of taxpayers and some of the lowest-paid and most dedicated workers we have, in the NHS and care sectors.
£17bn contracts without tendering
Now, at long last and after the smell has finally begun to permeate the corridors of Whitehall, the National Audit Office has taken a sniff. This so-called “public spending watchdog” has finally highlighted the “failures” of the government procurement process. It has taken due note of the fact that of more than £17bn of public contracts, there is “a lack of transparency, errors and potential conflicts of interest.” (Financial Times, November 18).
The National Audit Office, the Financial Times reports, “said the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health and Social Care had failed to explain why some companies with government connections or poor due diligence records were chosen to provide crucial services during the pandemic, such as supplying personal protective equipment or consulting and policy advice.”
Not even a paper-trail in procurement
The National Audit Office, according to the same Financial Times report, “highlighted contracts where the supplier had a close link to Whitehall. They included a £550,000 consulting deal with Public First, whose two directors previously worked for Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, and a technology agreement worth about £1m with Faculty, whose shareholders until recently included Theodore Agnew, another Cabinet Office minister”.
The Cabinet Office, it says, has “failed to document any consideration of any potential conflict of interest” and “failed to document why it chose this particular supplier” when it awarded the contracts”.
In one case, according to the Financial Times report on the NAO, “a £3m contract with consultancy firm Deloitte to support the procurement of PPE was not signed until four months after the work had begun” There is not even a clear document trail that identifies the procurement process.
The behaviours of a ‘banana republic’
So there it is, over £17bn in contracts without competitive tendering. Contracts given on the nod from friends and associates – and donors to – of the Conservative Party and Tory MPs. Top jobs given to the friends and partners of MPs. Huge amounts of money are going missing on dodgy and secretive contracts. If this was happening anywhere else in the world, the press be calling it the behaviours of a “banana republic”.
We expect no better from this government of millionaires for millionaires by millionaires. In fact, viewed logically, they have not been a “failure” to the class of people they represent. Boris Johnson and the Tory cabinet are perpetrating a conscious and deliberate fraud on the British taxpayer by allowing the public purse and particularly the NHS to be looted by their friends.
Labour should be twenty points ahead
But what is just even more staggering is the utter failure of the Labour leadership in parliament to call out this corruption for what it is. The leadership around Keir Starmer are far too preoccupied with rooting ‘Corbynism’ out of the party, far too concerned with emphasising their ‘New Leadership’ (read: ‘New Labour’) that they are allowing the Tories to get away with murder.
Labour should be twenty points ahead in opinion polls, instead of creeping one or two points forward. They need to call out this corruption for what it is. They need to demand the publication of all contracts. All NHS PPE procurement needs to be managed in-house and not through ‘consultants’. Profiteering has got to stop. NHS PFI contracts should be cancelled immediately. Private contracts for services like the failing test and trace system need to be cancelled. The NHS should be a fully funded and fully public service, managing its own procurement. On this issue alone, Labour could storm ahead of the Tories and could demand an early general election and win it. As long as the corruption is not called out for what it is, it will prosper. As long as Labour neglects to put across a strident anti-corruption message it will fail.
November 18, 2020
