It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Eagle. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) for securing the debate.
For the vast majority of the country, this pandemic has been an utter misery. It has been eight long months of loneliness, hardship and bereavement. For a wealthy few, however, it has been something quite different. For them, it has been opportunity to cash in on connections, and, boy, have they cashed in. Take, for example, Conservative donor David Meller, who has donated more than £60,000 to the party in the past decade, including thousands to support the leadership bid of the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who is now the Minister for the Cabinet Office—the Department that happens to be in charge of PPE procurement. Mr Meller’s company ordinarily specialises in home and beauty products, but has now been awarded more than £163 million in PPE contracts. That is nearly a tenfold increase on its entire 2019 turnover.
Such deals are far from isolated. A small, loss-making firm run by a Conservative councillor was handed a £156 million contract to import PPE. A company run by the former business associate of Conservative peer Baroness Mone was handed a £122 million in a PPE contract just seven weeks after it was set up. A deal to hand a private equity company a £252 million contract for face masks, which were never used, was brokered by a senior adviser to the International Trade Secretary, who also happens to sit on the board of the private equity company.
The National Audit Office report found that companies with political contacts were 10 times more likely to be handed contracts than those without such contacts. The newspapers describe these dealings as “chumocracy”,
and they have also called it cronyism, but if it was happening in another country, they would call it by a different name. I will leave it to the imagination of Members present and our constituents as to what that name would be.
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