My Lords, I start by thanking the Minister for introducing all the government amendments in this group. Again, it is very helpful, as there are quite a few of them, so we appreciate that.
I will speak to my four amendments and offer my support for the others in this group, so ably introduced by noble Lords. My first three are Amendments 455, 458 and 459A, which are on digital registers and digital information. I will speak to those first. Amendment 455 would require the establishment of a digital register of all public procurement for all notices; Amendment 458 would allow the creation of a digital registration system for suppliers; and Amendment 459A would require a contracting authority to publish required procurement documents on a single digital platform. The intended purpose is to allow public spending priorities and the performance of the procurement system to be understood by stakeholders, and therefore allow authorities to plan and deliver procurement in a strategic manner.
The Green Paper Transforming Public Procurement said that a
“lack of standardisation, transparency and interoperability is preventing the UK from harnessing the opportunities that open, common and shared data could bring”,
and that
“a clear digital procurement strategy focused on transparency results in greater participation and increased value for money driven by competition.”
The Cabinet Office Declaration on Government Reform policy paper, published in June last year, also supports this when it says:
“We must do better at making our data available to all so that we can be more effectively held to account.”
It also includes an action to:
“Ensure all data is as open as possible to public and third parties.”
I am sure we would all support that.
We were therefore very pleased to see this ambition reiterated by the Minister at Second Reading when he said:
“I acknowledge that transparency has been a key ask for the House. The House expects that transparency will be improved. We believe that the Bill does this.”—[Official Report, 25/5/22; col. 926.]
We have learned from today’s debate that real transparency is incredibly important to noble Lords, as this Bill progresses. We therefore believe that it is essential to put the Green Paper ambitions into the Bill, both to deliver on this promise effectively and to make sure that it cannot be rolled back or diluted, which is one of
our concerns. An unambiguous statement of this commitment would help secure adequate resources, and I am sure the Minister would agree with me on the importance of this.
Looking at Clause 88, on information relating to a procurement, in Part 8 of the Bill—there are number of subsections, so I will not read it all out—I just want to check that I am reading its implications correctly. If I understand it, it creates powers to have a single supplier portal right across government. If this is correct, it is extremely positive, but I would like clarification from the Minister that that is exactly the intention of this clause. If that is the case, it would save a huge amount of time across government and across business, allowing companies to register and update their credentials once to do business with UK government. It would also allow them to establish unique IDs for contracting authorities and, we hope, then move forward in a much more practical and efficient way, which is what we would all like to see. The purpose of my Amendment 455 is to allow the Bill and the Government to articulate this objective much more clearly. I would be grateful if the Minister can clarify this.
The other vital part of the Government’s data ambitions—to bring together all the notices and data around procurement into a single source—should also have the same elevation in the Bill. It is really important that the information can then be fed back into a variety of user-friendly ways to local authorities, major procurement companies and others, so that we can generate data-driven insights and properly track the performance of different companies. Because there is spend, there is live, ongoing and updated data, which will be extremely helpful. There seems to be the ambition behind the UK’s adoption and approval of the open contracting data standard, about which it would again be helpful to get clarification. The purpose of my three amendments on data is to gain clearer provisions in this regard in the Bill, which will be easier to understand for anyone working in the procurement industry or wanting to gain a contract.
The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, also has a number of amendments on data, and I thank him for his support for one of my amendments. I know he will speak to his amendments, but I think we are in the same place on all this. I am extremely grateful for his amendments and will listen carefully to what he has to say when he introduces them.
I turn to my other amendment, Amendment 459, and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for her support for it. Its purpose is to require each ministerial department to calculate the estimated carbon emissions from public contracts entered into and to lay an annual report on this before Parliament. The amendment seeks to look at the impact of the procurement regime from an emissions perspective. Given the weather at the moment, climate change is on everyone’s mind, so I hope the Minister and the Government will think carefully about the areas where we are looking to improve the impact of the Procurement Bill—on climate change, emissions, net zero and so forth.
There is a National Audit Office report on public sector emissions, which is extremely worth looking at. I urge the Minister to have a close look at it to see whether there is any way that its recommendations can also be part of what we are trying to achieve through the Procurement Bill. The main issue is around reporting: although many companies will do it voluntarily, many others do not report at all, so there is no balance in the information that we have. For example, there are no mandatory emissions measurements or reporting requirements for the public sector as a whole. The wider public sector includes local authorities, schools and hospitals, all of which may well have high carbon emissions. Peers for the Planet published a very good report on local authorities and net zero, in which it noted that there was little consistency in local government reporting of emissions. I understand that a lot of this concerns BEIS, but the Procurement Bill provides us with an opportunity to look at whether this is something that would have a positive impact on driving down emissions.
This concludes the introduction of my amendments and I will turn now to those of other noble Lords. Many noble Lords spoke in support of the different amendments on the publication of notices and the concerns around freedom of information. My noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in particular, made an extremely important speech about his two amendments. He said again that it is a welcome ambition to simplify what we are trying to achieve here with procurement. As I have said, any noble Lord who worked on OJEU will be very grateful for simplification. As was debated last week, it is terribly important that we do not make things more difficult for SMEs, charities, voluntary organisations and, as my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn said, for freelancers, who were often forgotten when we debated this Bill previously. Transparency is clearly very important when looking at those kinds of contracts.
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The noble Lord also spoke to his Amendment 449 around the importance of transparency around FoIs. This is incredibly important. We had a few examples of this. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is not in his place, but he, too, had an amendment on FoI. My noble friend Lord Berkeley spoke to his amendments on this and made an important contribution. The noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, gave a particularly powerful example of the problems he had trying to get information through an FoI about Hikvision. If we are going to have freedom of information, it should be freedom of information unless there is a very good reason why the information should not be available. It is concerning that that is not becoming the norm and that we are moving away from that. I shall be interested to hear the Minister’s response, but I hope that the Government will take particular note of that.
Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, talked about the need for clarification on what the regulations will be for the publication of notices, documents and information. There is a welcome ambition on transparency in the Bill. We support the Government in what they are trying to achieve on that, but we must make sure that it happens in a way that is effective and makes a difference.