On 18 February a High Court judge ruled that Health Secretary Matt Hancock ‘acted unlawfully’ by failing to publish multi-billion-pound Covid-19 contracts, issued by the government, within the thirty day period required by law.
The case was brought by the Good Law Project (GLP), a not-for-profit organisation, which through its legal challenges has helped shed some light on the cronyism at the heart of government in the granting of contracts for protective personal equipment (PPE) and other services connected to the pandemic. A cronyism made ‘official’ with the setting up in April last year of the ‘high priority lane’ known as the VIP lane which allowed government ministers, MPs, members of the House of Lords and other government toadies to recommend companies of friends, relatives and other associates access to the gravy train of the Covid contracts.
The judge in his summing up said, ‘The Secretary of State spent vast quantities of public money on pandemic-related procurements during 2020. The public were entitled to see who this money was going to, what it was being spent on and how the relevant contracts were awarded.‘ The reluctance of the government to act transparently in publishing the contracts could have something to do with the fact that it has been calculated by the investigative website, Byline Times, that at least £900m worth of contracts have been awarded to companies that have donated, either directly or through their owners, £8.2m to the Conservative Party. Byline Times reported that a firm with links to Hancock’s family was awarded a £5.5m contract for Covid-19 mobile testing units, while a family friend of Hancock was awarded a £14.4m contract for the supply of PPE.
Another reported friend of Hancock, who used to run a pub near Hancock’s constituency home, was given a £30m contract for his company to produce vials for Covid testing even though his company had no prior experience of producing medical equipment. According to the friend the contract was approved after WhatsApp messages between him and Hancock. In July last year the BBC reported that a Conservative councillor’s company, P14 Medical, was given PPE contracts to supply face shields worth a total of £120m. Legal action by the GLP has also exposed the fact that Dominic Cummings was central in awarding a contract of over £500,000 to a company, Public First, run by friends of both himself and Michael Gove to research the government’s messaging over the Corona virus pandemic.
According to the National Audit Office between March and July 2020, new contracts worth £17.3bn relating to the Covid pandemic were awarded to suppliers. £10.5bn was awarded without any competitive tendering, £6.7bn was awarded directly to pre-approved suppliers though they were not necessarily approved for the products they were selling, and only £0.2bn was awarded through a competitive process.
The GLP is now in the process of taking legal action in relation to three huge PPE contracts, awarded without any competitive tendering, to companies with no history of work in the medical field. ‘£108m went to a tiny pest control company with net assets of £18,000, Pestfix. Another £108m went to a modestly sized confectioner in Northern Ireland, Clandeboye Agencies. And another contract, worth £252m, was awarded to Ayanda, an opaque private fund owned through a tax haven.’ Included in the Ayanda contract was the delivery of 50m face masks to the NHS which on arrival were deemed unsuitable for use as they didn’t meet the safety standards required.
A 4 March report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on the governments Test and Trace programme stated that £37bn has been allocated by the government to run the programme over two years. That is in reality £37bn to be funnelled into the private sector over two years. Serco, which is one of the main companies running the Test and Trace programme, saw its profits rise last year by 75% to £179.2m. The CEO of Serco, one Rupert Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill and brother of retired Tory MP Nicholas Soames, along with the Chief Financial Officer Angus Cockburn, pocketed bonuses totalling £5.5m.
The report was generally critical over the massive cost of the programme and its effectiveness. The Chair of the PAC Labour MP Meg Hillier said, ‘Yet despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project Test and Trace cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic, and the promise on which this huge expense was justified – avoiding another lockdown – has been broken, twice.’ In January and February there were still approximately 2,500 ‘consultants’ working for Test and Trace, including 900 from Deloitte, they take on average £1,100 a day with some taking up to £6,624. At the beginning of November last year it was estimated that ‘consultancy’ costs were approximately £375m.
The pandemic while bringing over 150,000 deaths, creating unemployment, poverty and homelessness for the working class has created an obscene gravy train for the ruling class. They have been falling over themselves to get their snouts into the trough.
Bob Shepard
