My Lords, I rise to speak briefly on Amendment 240 in particular, to which I would have attached my name had I noticed it in time. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. What he set out in terms of the problems of framework agreements are the kind of things we often encounter in the pages of Private Eye; it really is time that we saw some action on this issue.
Amendment 240
“is intended to prevent the future use of ‘VIP lanes’ for public contracts.”
I rather suspect that the nation out there, which is exhausted by politics, is probably not glued to your Lordships’ Grand Committee on the Procurement Bill this evening. I looked up the schedule: people are probably watching either “The Simpsons” or “Britain’s Parking Hell”. However, I know from what I get in my mailbag and what I see on social media that what happened during Covid with VIP lanes is a huge, continuing concern among large numbers of the British public. It was only last month that the Government were forced to admit that 50 firms had been put into the priority lane for test and trace contracts, worth billions. They included Immensa, a firm that was subsequently at the heart of more than 43,000 false negative results and had been incorporated only in May 2020. This came after the Good Law Project successfully challenged the Government’s VIP lane for personal protective equipment contracts.
So we have a situation where people are now looking at politics and saying, “We want to see things done differently”. This small, modest amendment would set a marker for achieving that; I feel that it deserves more attention both in this Room and outside it.