UK Parliament / Open data

Procurement Bill [Lords]

Proceeding contribution from Meg Hillier (Labour) in the House of Commons on Tuesday, 13 June 2023. It occurred during Debate on bills on Procurement Bill [Lords].

I rise to speak to a number of amendments. It is worth highlighting that the bread and butter of the work of the Public Accounts Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, is looking at procurement—failed procurement in particular—and making sure that we get on the record and into the brain of Whitehall the lessons learned from those failures. We have also been at the forefront of looking at procurement during covid, and we did our first inquiries into that as early as June 2020. I want to place on record my thanks for the hard work of the National Audit Office, which immediately pivoted to online working to enable us to continue our scrutiny of the Government as a cross-party parliamentary Committee.

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The National Audit Office also highlighted the VIP lane, which was a matter of concern. We were shocked to discover that certain people were given special access to the Government. It is as a result of that and further NAO work, and the work that led to the Boardman review of the Cabinet Office, that the Government changed the rules about how procurement was conducted, particularly in the Department of Health and Social Care, where there was a real issue about record keeping. For that reason, I welcome new clause 15, but is a sadness to me that we have to put so forcibly into the Bill something as basic as keeping records of how decisions are made when procurement contracts are let.

Procurement is about much more than legislation, as we have highlighted repeatedly on the Public Accounts Committee. We need highly skilled public procurement professionals, and it is a good thing that in the nearly 12 years that I have been a member of the Committee we have seen more people with that skill enter Whitehall and do a good job. Some of the best bits of covid came about because there were experts on hand to advise the Departments in an emergency. Some of the worst bits were a result of there not being enough procurement specialists in a Department to do that work. Procurement, like finance, is too important to be left just to procurement professionals, and I hope this Bill will contribute to that general move in Whitehall alongside the work of some of the best people in Whitehall who are trying to deliver better results, and the work of Committees such as mine in highlighting when things are going well and the repeated times when they are not going so well.

I will talk about evaluation in more detail in a moment, but more transparency is needed generally. The Public Accounts Committee has the privilege of calling for persons, papers and records, so we sometimes see papers that are not generally available to the public. We would

like information to be in the public domain as much as possible, and more transparency, not less, is important, particularly in emergency situations such as covid. There should be nothing to hide when taxpayers’ money is at stake. Of course there are commercial discussions to be had at some points, which is why we have systems in place whereby I and other members of the Committee, and when necessary other Select Committee Chairs, can see information about decisions before the final commercial contract is signed. This is to ensure that there is some parliamentary oversight. I pay tribute to the Deputy Chair of the Committee, the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), who has been instrumental in being part of that scrutiny and making sure that this is not down to just one person—the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee—or just a handful of people. He and I often work assiduously together on these matters.

The other key thing is evaluation of what has worked. That draws me to amendment 68, which I commend the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) for working on. The Committee has been looking increasingly at the evaluation of what has worked, and that is really important for procurement. An example is the emergency services network that was introduced after the tragedy of the 7/7 bombings in London, when our emergency services were unable to talk to each other because of connection problems. There had been similar problems in the past. A firm decision was made in 2010 to get rid of the old contract in 2015 and have a whole new all-singing, all-dancing system by which our emergency services could connect through the mobile network.

The Committee has looked at procurement 14 or 15 times. Some of the problems we have seen have been around policy decisions, but a lot has been around contracting. As I say, we have had the privilege of calling persons, papers and records, so I have had the privilege—I am not sure if it is a privilege—of seeing some of the back documentation on those issues. That highlights why we need to evaluate what is not working and what has worked. Amendment 68 calls for an independent body to look at that, but we now have a system in Government in which there is a bit more discussion, although not enough, about evaluating policy. In the heat, cut and thrust of elections, we politicians might be in office for only five years if we are lucky, so we want to get things done, and evaluation seems like it will slow things down. But whatever party is in government, it is important to learn what has worked in the past and what has not. A large amount of what we want to deliver, whether it is services for people in receipt of benefits or important security measures, are things that any Government will have to deal with, and there are lessons to be learned from the contracts that are in place.

From the point of view of the Minister and of the shadow Minister, anything that looks like an expensive spending commitment is alarming at the moment. As Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, I understand that, but I cite the example of a programme introduced by the Department for Education to review innovative approaches to dealing with children in social care. The Department’s then permanent secretary said that evaluating contracts of this scale is effectively a “rounding error” in the budget. It is possible to write in that evaluation as part of good, proper, professional contracting.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
734 cc213-4 
Session
2022-23
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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