It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney). I rise to speak to amendments 61 to 67, which stand in the name of the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge)—sadly, she cannot be here today, so Members are stuck with me. I cannot do an impression of the energy she would have brought to this debate, but I can try to present the arguments that I think she would have made.
What we are trying to do with these amendments is strengthen the provisions in the Bill to help tackle economic crime. One would think, quite logically, that in a Bill on public sector procurement, the risks of economic crime would be quite a significant issue that
we would be trying to deal with. I think it is quite right that we use the Bill to tackle issues of national security or modern-day slavery, but equally, I think it is wrong that we do not have the full protections we need for economic crime in the UK.
This is not just a theoretical problem. In a survey from about five years ago, about a quarter of councils said that they had been victims of corruption in their procurement processes. We estimate that the losses are around £876 million a year—the biggest cause of financial loss in local government—so there is clearly plenty of scope for improvement in our performance. We welcome the fact that under the new UK procurement regime, we have an exclusion and debarring regime that is much better, probably much tougher, and hopefully much easier to use. Those provisions do exist in the EU procurement regime, but they have been extraordinarily rarely used in the UK. I think we all hope that we will be much more effective at using the protections that we are putting in place through the Bill.