The Failure of the Elite (4): Sleaze, Cronyism and Mismanagement in the Covid Crisis
- lisaluger
- Jan 18, 2022
- 22 min read
Updated: Jun 9, 2023
(LL) (UK)
What distinguishes war profiteers from politicians in a crisis?
War profiteers use the emergency to make excessive profits while politicians are supposed to resolve the situation. Naturally, business people and their companies are more likely to be war profiteers, as they immediately and instinctively recognise the opportunity for profits. Still, they do, of course, solve some of the country’s problems along the way. On the other hand, politicians should not be profit-minded except for prosperity and security for the country or the people they govern. Their purpose is, and this is expected of them, to solve problems or overcome crises without regard to personal gain. Common good first – instead of self-interest first! These boundaries are currently not evident to the governing elite in the UK, particularly during the pandemic and the resulting crisis.
Chumocracy
The Covid pandemic exposed the extent of sleaze, cronyism, nepotism and mismanagement in British public life. It became clear that when a problem arises for the incumbent ruling elite, the first question is not, “How can we solve this problem and what support do we need to solve it?” No, the first question is, “What are the opportunities in this situation for my friends and me to gain money, power, prestige and status? Who wants and needs what job, who wants and needs what lucrative government contract?”
A close-knit group of chums appoints friends and gives jobs to friends. Influential individuals of this clique who pulled the strings in the course of the pandemic were, in addition to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson: his Special Advisor Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove, Cabinet Office Minister, and Matt Hancock, the then Health Secretary, as well as their friends from Vote Leave, who had given Boris Johnson and his colleagues crucial support in the Brexit campaign and the election campaign.
More than any other state, England in particular, not the whole of the UK, outsourced large parts of its pandemic response, often to entrepreneurs and companies with close ties to Conservative politicians or their friends, whereby expertise seemed to be secondary.
Vital positions for chums
Holding an honorary post gives social prestige and is suitable for networking, especially if that honorary post is at the government level.
Catherine Elizabeth (Kate) Bingham graduated from Oxford with a degree in biochemistry and an MBA from Harvard Business School. In 1991, Kate became a managing partner at SV Health Investments, a venture capital firm, and serves on the boards of numerous international healthcare companies. In May 2020, she was appointed Chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. In this honorary position, she managed the procurement of the Covid-19 vaccine and developed a strategy for its distribution. The appointment took place without any competitive tendering or even a rudimentary public discussion of personnel.
Questions were raised as to what qualified Kate Bingham to do the job, other than having gone to public school with the Prime Minister’s sister, Rachel, and being married to Tory MP Jesse Norman, who in turn was a fellow student of Boris Johnson at Eton.
The success of the vaccination programme initially silenced her critics. Her politician friends defended her appointment, citing her good connections to pharmaceutical companies as a mark of quality, which is understandable given her professional career. However, she was heavily criticised for insisting on bringing her own staff of PR consultants, eight full-time consultants from the London-based PR agency Admiral Associates, instead of relying on the civil service press officers. The services of these consultants were not honorary but cost the taxpayer £670,000 until the end of 2020.
In November 2020, Kate Bingham faced calls for her resignation. She was accused of leaking commercially sensitive information about the UK government’s vaccination strategy to investors at an international conference. But Downing Street stood behind her, insisting she had only given out publicly available information. Nevertheless, the Government announced shortly afterwards that Kate Bingham would resign from her post at the end of the year. However, to dispel the impression of misconduct and sanction, the Government pointed out that the position had only been temporary anyway.
Scientists and the media consistently praised Kate Bingham’s management of the vaccination programme. Under her leadership, from May to December 2020, 350 million doses of six different vaccines were secured; and infrastructure for manufacturing, distribution and clinical trials was established. Kate Bingham clearly had not only a good network and expensive PR advisors but also competence to show.
The UK was not so lucky with Diana Mary “Dido” Harding. She, like Kate Bingham, became the head of the UK government’s NHS test and trace operation without a competitive tender.
Dido Harding is married to Tory MP John Penrose and is well-connected. She was made a peer in 2014 by her good friend, the then Prime Minister David Cameron, and sits for the Tories in the House of Lords. As a director of the Cheltenham Jockey Club, she awarded honorary membership to her good friend Matt Hancock, horse racing enthusiast and Health Minister until May 2021.
Dido Harding, the former chief executive of telecoms company TalkTalk, was appointed in October 2017 as chair of NHS Improvement (NHSI), the body responsible for overseeing and supporting NHS providers and trusts in England, but whose role remains mainly unclear to the public. There was no competitive application process conducted in public.
Dido Harding’s job as chair was a part-time, two-day-a-week job, paying between £60 – £65,000 a year. Some NHSI board members gave up their salaries to save the health service money. Not so, Baroness Dido Harding.
The Government offered her two honorary positions, which she accepted: She became head of the NHS Test and Trace Service in May 2020, and Matt Hancock appointed her to lead a new National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP). Both roles are honorary.
However, what Dido Harding did to earn the Government’s trust in a crisis is unknown to the public. The test and trace programme, which she managed from May 2020 to April 2021, had little success. The programme failed to make a significant impact in containing the covid pandemic, despite a budget of £37 billion (€44 billion).
To be fair, Dido Harding had little decision-making or creative leeway when she took office. Critical points of the programme had already been decided before she took up the post. For example, instead of using the expertise of the NHS and university research institutes, private companies should be given preference. Logistical decisions, methodology and objectives had also already been set.
Was Dido Harding just a figurehead who, if things turned pear-shaped, could be made a scapegoat? Did the political decision-makers in the background not want to take responsibility for planning and implementation?
The Guardian newspaper thoroughly researched the links between the various players in the Covid crisis management and highlighted the “cronyism” or “chumocracy” within the Tory establishment. See the following link for more details and a graphic showing the interconnections between friends and business.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/15/chumocracy-covid-revealed-shape-tory-establishment
Non-transparent procurement by Tory politicians
When the Corona pandemic broke out, the increasing demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) quickly led to shortages. There was a particular urgency to supply staff in the NHS health service.
To quickly meet the need for PPE for the NHS workforce, the UK government resorted to placing orders for PPE supplies under an emergency procedure. This way, contracts were awarded directly to companies without a tendering process and competition. Such a “direct award” is legally permissible if there is only one supplier or in cases of extreme urgency due to unforeseen events or danger to life, etc. Even then, the Government is legally obliged to publish a contract award notice for all contracts over £120,000 within 30 days of the agreement being signed, to make the award process, and thereby the award criteria, transparent.
According to a report by the National Audit Office (NAO), £17.3bn worth of contracts were awarded between March and July 2020, of which £10.5bn without competition. £6.7bn went to suppliers who were already approved but not necessarily approved for the products they offered and sold to the Government in the face of pandemic urgency. Only £0.2 billion was awarded through a tender process.
The Good Law Project denounced that the Government had published the details of the awarded contracts with significant delay and had poorly explained the reasons for their decisions.
Source: What’s going on with the Government’s Covid contracts 30 June 2021, BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56174954.
According to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the Government had awarded VIP fast-track contracts to 50 companies to supply Covid protective equipment such as masks, gloves, gowns and other safety equipment. Eighteen of these companies were put forward by Conservative politicians, including former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove, and Boris Johnson’s close advisor Dominic Cummings. For more information, visit:
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59334952, Covid: 50 firms got VIP fast-track equipment contracts. 18 November 2021.
Concrete examples of underhand awarding of contracts
When the media and opposition politicians pointed out this practice of “under the table” contracting and demanded clarification, the Government justified its actions with the need to act in an emergency. The emergency required a quick effort to save lives. In addition, governments around the world were competing for medical products. This situation required trustworthy, proven partners from the private sector to be engaged quickly and without bureaucracy.
This reasoning may still apply to “Randox Laboratories Ltd”.
Randox Laboratories Limited, an international testing and health company based in Northern Ireland, has had multi-million dollar contracts with the UK government since before the Covid pandemic and is a significant player in the Covid testing programme. The company also gives regular donations to the Conservative Party and is well-connected to relevant politicians.
Randox attended a meeting with the Government on 17 March 2020 to discuss a new Covid testing scheme. At this meeting, the Government decided to develop large centralised laboratories outside the existing health and research structures, bypassing the existing laboratories and resources at universities.
Randox was awarded two significant contracts to supply test kits for the Test and Trace project: the first contract for £133 million was granted on 18 May 2020, and the second for £346.5 million followed later. Randox was awarded the contract under the Covid 19 emergency scheme, evading the tendering process required for public contracts.
However, this is not the only criticism.
Although one might have expected this company to have the professional expertise, there were qualitative problems. For example, in August 2020, Randox had to recall 750,000 test kits supplied to nursing homes because they did not meet the required standards. This resulted in a shortage of functioning test kits, making regular testing of nursing staff and nursing home residents difficult.
Remember explicitly that the criterion for emergency contracting was trust in tried and tested business partners.
However, Randox already had difficulties obtaining test kits at the beginning of the first contract. This potential procurement problem had been included in the contract, and the Government had agreed to assist Randox in procuring test kits. Matt Hancock contacted the university laboratories, which they initially disregarded, to borrow the test kits needed. Well, what can you say to that? A company is given a government contract that it may not even be able to fulfil, so the Government partly does the job itself?! That is strange, to say the least.
The Government also paid almost £1.5m to provide an airlift between Stansted and Belfast airports to transport Covid test kits from England’s care homes to Randox labs in Northern Ireland so that the tests could be processed at Randox labs in Antrim. If this is the trend, with the state using its taxpayers’ money to take over the logistics of companies that have taken on government contracts, then such contracts will become really attractive. Good for the company that has good relations with the Tories.
The link between horse racing and the Tories
But to what extent was the recently disgraced Conservative MP Owen Paterson involved? Here comes the link between horse racing and Tories. “Randox Health” has been a sponsor of the Grand National at the Aintree Jockey Club in Liverpool since 2016, whose chair for many years was Rose Paterson, Owen’ Paterson’s recently deceased wife and close friend of Dido Harding. Owen Paterson himself had been a consultant for Randox Laboratories Ltd since 2015. Since April 2017, he has been paid £8,333 per month for his 16-hour job. Although Paterson and Randox denied any involvement by Paterson in the awarding of the government contract to Randox, it is known that Paterson had attended meetings and held discussions with the Health Minister, Lord Bethell. The parliamentary standards committee investigating Paterson’s conduct concluded that it was a severe breach of Parliament’s standards for lobbying. (For more information on the Government’s efforts to protect one of its own, see a separate post).
Source: Covid: What do we know about Randox and its contracts? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/59219803, 17 November 2021.
Source: Geoghegan, Peter. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n21/peter-geoghegan/cronyism-and-clientelism. LRB. 5 November 2020.
Another company, “Medacs”, controlled by Tory Party donor and former party leader, Lord Ashcroft, was awarded a lucrative £350m contract by the Department of Health in December 2020 to run the Covid vaccination campaign. Further evidence that companies linked to the UK government or the Conservative Party have profited from the pandemic.
These companies mentioned belong to the network of the ruling elite, but at least they have expertise in the health sector.
However, the latter does not apply to “Ayanda Capital“. This company has connections, but no expertise, as was soon apparent.
This investment firm, which specialises in foreign exchange, offshore real estate, private equity and trade finance, was awarded a contract worth £252 million in April 2020 to supply face masks. However, 50 million of these face masks were never used because of concerns that they would not cover the face adequately. This contract was brokered by a Board of Trade advisor at the Department for International Trade (DIT), chaired by the then Minister of State for International Trade, Liz Truss, a senior advisor to the board at “Ayanda Capital”. As a government member and party member, she brokered a lucrative contract with a company on whose board she serves but with no expertise in health products.
In this case, the Government’s arguments to justify awarding contracts directly as quickly as possible do not hold water.
Source: Geoghegan, Peter: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n21/peter-geoghegan/cronyism-and-clientelism. LRB. 5 November 2020.
Here are a few more examples that suggest a watering can approach to contracting, where the reason for the award is more likely to have links to politicians than expertise.
A company, “Meller Design“, owned by a Conservative donor that supplies supermarket chains with cosmetics, has been awarded a £65 million contract to supply face masks.
Small, loss-making “P14 Medical“, which used to sell medical equipment and was run by a Conservative councillor in Stroud, won a £270m contract to supply personal protective equipment for NHS staff.
In November 2020, it was revealed that a Spanish businessman, ‘Gabriel Gonzales Andersson‘, received £21 million for his services as an intermediary in the procurement of protective clothing. A further £15 million commission was agreed for later. Gonzales worked with Michael Saiger, a Florida-based jewellery designer who set up a company to supply PPE to various governments at the beginning of the pandemic.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54974373. Go-between paid £21m in taxpayer funds for NHS PPE. 17 November 2020
How can the Government speak of years of successful and trusting cooperation when the company was only founded at the beginning of the pandemic? A similar question also arises about the service provided by Zoe Ley.
The owner of the organic dog food company “The Rockstar“, Zoe Ley from London, received at least £1 million to help the British Government conclude a contract with a Hong Kong company to supply PPE worth £258 million. What could be the particular expertise of this entrepreneur? Perhaps she sources ingredients for the dog food from Hong Kong?
No, no, it’s more professional than that.
Zoe Ley, an investment banker by training, founded Life Partners in May 2020 to “deliver Covid-related products”. She acted as an intermediary between the Hong Kong company “Worldlink Resources” and the British Government. In a kind of undercover operation, the BBC programme Panorama found out that, according to the Hong Kong company, Zoe Ley’s company was a bridge to the British Government. So nothing gets past her! How she qualified for this position, however, remains a government secret.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56400527. Covid contracts: Dog food vendor probably earned £1m for PPE deals, 15 March 2021
The list of companies to which the Government has awarded Covid-related contracts is endless. The Government must be forced to explain what qualifies these companies to support the UK government in a deep crisis such as a pandemic and why it made such heavy and, to outsiders, relatively arbitrary use of outside businessmen in fighting the pandemic.
Mismanagement – consequences of non-transparent procurement practice
There are good reasons why state bodies are obliged to conduct a public tendering procedure for contracts of public interest financed with taxpayers’ money. One of the reasons is to prevent corruption. Another has economic efficiency in mind. Still, another is to ensure quality and expertise. All of these reasons are to avoid mismanagement.
Several examples show that this is precisely what has not been avoided. Instead, the Government wasted millions of taxpayers’ money because the expertise of the contract recipients was not nearly sufficient or even deemed necessary.
Fifty million FFP2 face masks for health workers, sourced from ‘Ayanda Capital’ in April 2020, could not be used in the NHS because of safety concerns. This is because they did not fit properly and did not provide sufficient protection.
The use of 10 million sterile surgical gowns for NHS staff had to be suspended due to improper packaging as they did not meet UK sterilisation standards. The gowns, as mentioned above, had been purchased for £70 billion by the US company “Saiger LLC“, brokered by Spanish businessman Gabriel Gonzales Andersson.
The NHS never used millions of sterile medical gowns bought for the NHS for £122 million from “PPE Medpro” because they did not meet British standards for the sterilisation of medical devices. The company “PPE Medpro” had only been founded in May 2020. It is entirely unclear where the Government’s trust in this company came from.
The NHS could not use one million high-quality masks supplied by “Polyco Healthline” because they did not meet the correct safety standards. As a result, the company had to issue a recall.
PPE insulation suits worth £32 million, sourced from “PestFix“, had been stored in an NHS stockpile for months awaiting a safety assessment. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that these suits did not meet the British standard for use in hospitals. What is also worrying is that the HSE said it had come under political pressure to put the suits through the quality testing process and approve their use. The political side obviously did not attach much importance to testing according to correct standards.
Alex Bourne, who runs a pub near ex-health minister Matt Hancocks’ original constituency, was awarded a £30 million contract to manufacture medical tubes during the pandemic, even though he had no experience in manufacturing medical goods. But he still got the call. Bourne had offered his services to the Government via a personal WhatsApp message to the health minister. A conventional way is when you are well acquainted with each other, but an unconventional route is when government contracts are involved. His company “Hinpack” manufactured plastic cups and takeaway boxes for the catering industry until it closed in 2019 due to insolvency. Bourne had managed to convince health ministry officials that he was capable of supplying tens of millions of sterile test tubes. In the Covid testing programme, test tubes were critical medical products. However, a quality check of 11,000 test tubes from “Hinpack” by the Ministry of Health found that all 11,000 test tubes were defective. They either had cracks, breaks or scratches, or the lids were missing or poorly screwed on. After the checks, Alex Bourne was forced to recall at least 8 million test tubes; as they had not passed the pressure test, their tightness could not be guaranteed. The UK’s Medicines and Health Care Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) investigates the company.
Source: Timeline: Covid contracts and allegations of ‘chumocracy’, BBC 20 April 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56319927
What is the point of hastily awarding emergency contracts to the next best friends and acquaintances under the pretext of urgency if the products are defective or unusable? Not to mention the waste of taxpayers’ money.
Extending urgent procurement procedures to communication services
Procuring medical products during a pandemic does have a particular urgency. That is indisputable. Understandably, a responsible government wants to avoid a bureaucratic tendering process in such a situation. Mistakes that happen during this process must nevertheless be investigated, accounted for and sanctioned. And for that exceptional practice to become standard procedure, even in the absence of an emergency, is a great danger. Unfortunately, the United Kingdom, because of its elitist crony Tory politicians, is predestined to reinterpret this danger as an opportunity. Indeed, the Government suspended all Covid-related competitions and tenders in all departments. Ministers had the green light to award contracts directly. Consequently, there was little transparency about on what basis contracts were awarded.
This contracting practice and the resulting lack of transparency were also evident in the services and communications sector.
At least four of the companies able to obtain consultancy contracts without wider tendering have links to the Conservative Government, the Conservative party ( the Tories) or the Vote Leave campaign, which supported Boris Johnson in delivering Brexit. So how did this come about?
Shortly before Boris Johnson announced the first lockdown in March 2020, Lee Chain, Boris Johnson’s head of communications, held a video call with some PR advisers. They discussed how to communicate the Government’s pandemic response message more pointedly.
The video call participants were companions of Boris Johnson and his special advisor, Dominic Cummings. They had already supported them during the Brexit and subsequent election campaigns. They knew and trusted each other, as they had already worked together successfully. Understandably, the Prime Minister wanted to make use of this expertise. So Michael Gove’s cabinet office contracted them and paid them generously but without a public tender process.
The question is, however, whether a whole population or the whole country has to accept the subjective criteria of a prime minister and of a government clique. Where are objective standards, comparisons with competitors, the inclusion of other perspectives, and cost transparency….?
Let’s look at the consultancies that were graced with contracts, for whatever reason:
“Public First”, a political consultancy, was commissioned by Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office to research public opinion on the Government’s Covid communications. Over £1m was allocated for this. The company owners (James Frayne and Rachel Wolf) are closely connected to key figures in the Tory Government. James Frayne is a political fellow of Dominic Cummings; Rachel Wolf supported Michael Gove in writing the Conservative Party manifesto for the last election.
“Hanbury Strategy”, a political and lobbying consultancy, received £648,000 from the Cabinet Office to research public attitudes and behaviour through weekly surveys. The co-founder of this company, Paul Stephenson, was the communications director of the Vote Leave campaign and had worked closely with Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s special adviser.
“Topham Guerin”, a political communications company, was awarded a £3 million contract to clarify the Government’s Covid messages. The two directors, Sean Topham and Ben Guerin, had handled social media communications for the Conservative Party’s 2019 election campaign in the past.
Source: Geoghegan, Peter https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n21/peter-geoghegan/cronyism-and-clientelism, LRB. 5 November 2020.
“Faculty Science Ltd”, an artificial intelligence and data analytics company, also received several government contracts. The company had also worked with Vote Leave. After Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, an employee of “Faculty Science Ltd”, Ben Warner, was hired by Dominic Cummings as a data expert in Downing Street. During the 2019 election campaign, Ben Warner had undertaken data modelling for the Conservative Party. As a government advisor, he regularly attended SAGE meetings. Warner’s brother Marc is managing director of “Faculty Science Ltd” and a close friend of Dominic Cummings. “Faculty Science Ltd” received several contracts from various government departments (e.g. a £400,000 contract from the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government; £350,000 from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) under the Pandemic Emergency Regulations. In addition, there was a £930,000 contract with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) for work on artificial intelligence for NHSX, the digital arm of the NHS. However, as the Faculty points out, this contract was awarded following a competitive tendering process.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/15/chumocracy-covid-revealed-shape-tory-establishment
Dubious award criteria for mission-critical logistics
Between March 2020 and November 2020, the UK government awarded Covid consultancy contracts worth more than £100 million, for example, for work on the Test and Trace programme. In addition, various government departments awarded more than £56 million to multiple consultancies to manage the pandemic alone from March to August 2020. The firms were hired to work on the track and trace system, supervise the purchase of PPE equipment and the production of fans, among other things. Almost all the contracts were awarded without giving other firms a chance to bid.
At the end of March 2020, the Cabinet Office hired the audit company “Deloitte” to lead a crisis team to procure PPE masks.
What qualifies an accounting firm for such an assignment? To answer this question, one must consider that the MP for the Conservative Party and Minister of State Chloe Smith (until Sept 2021 at the Department for Constitution and Devolution) was a consultant at Deloitte before her career in politics.
Deloitte won contracts worth at least £8m from four government departments. The firm was hired to develop a network of drive-through rapid testing centres that would be the backbone of the Government’s Corona pandemic testing strategy. Deloitte was also brought in to help execute the test-and-trace programme. To achieve this, Deloitte hired 1000 other external consultants, including 40 from the Boston Consultancy Group, some of whom collected £6250 per day in fees.
The biggest winner of the failed test-and-trace programme is the controversial company “Serco“, a logistics giant that, among other things, manages most of England’s prison and probation services. Serco has received an estimated £410 million for its involvement in the test-and-trace programme. However, having little familiarity with the logistics and design of tracing, Serco subcontracted the work to companies of its choice. So the question arises, why did Serco get the contract, although the company is not sufficiently familiar with the track and trace matter, even according to its own assessment?
The minister for Health in the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Edward Argar, was a Serco lobbyist before becoming a minister. But according to government sources, he was not involved in the contracting process, which is hard to believe.
It is scandalous that Serco and the Ministry of Health refuse to disclose the names of the more than 30 intermediaries who have hired between 9500 and 10500 people for contact tracing. Many of these self-employed people have zero-hours contracts, no guaranteed income, and complain of poor training and few assignments. Their task is to contact by telephone from their home people who have had contact with infected people. One worker complained that he had only two phone calls in 5 months with people who needed to be contacted. This is indeed astonishing. According to SAGE, the Government’s scientific advisory group, the virus can only be contained if at least 80 per cent of the contacts of an infected person are reached within 48 hours. – The test-and-trace system did not even come close to meeting these requirements.
Unfortunately, the Ministry of Health failed to insert a penalty clause in the contract with Serco. So failure does not diminish Serco’s profits from this contract.
The Government’s pandemic control project, critical to its success, must be considered a failure. Many have earned from it, just not the citizens of the United Kingdom.
The Government should have known better because both companies, Serco and Deloitte, are renowned for their misconduct in handling government contracts.
Serco Geografix, a daughter company of Serco, was fined £19.2m plus legal costs by the Serious Fraud Office. Its parent company, Serco, had already compensated the victim of the fraud, the Ministry of Justice, with £70m as part of a civil settlement in 2013. Serco Geografix had to accept responsibility for three fraud offences and two cases of false accounting in connection with the provision of electronic surveillance services. The fraudulent intent is particularly evident in that Serco had charged for services for offenders who were already deceased.
Deloitte, Serco’s auditor, was fined £4.2m plus legal costs and given a severe reprimand by the Financial Reporting Council for its patchy audit of the 2011 and 2012 financial statements of Serco's daughter company Serco Geografix Limited. Deloitte, the council said, had failed to act under professional competence and due care principles.
Source: The accountant online. https://www.theaccountant-online.com/news/newsdeloitte-fined-42m-over-audit-of-serco-geografix-sfo-fines-serco-192m-7290192/
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/15/chumocracy-covid-revealed-shape-tory-establishment
Against this background, it sounds almost cynical to recall that the Government argued its fast-track award was justified on years of trust and cooperation.
Under the fast-track rules, the Government handed contracts to private companies to conduct covid tests, provide food parcels and equip schools without a tendering process.
For example, the Department for Education awarded a contract worth £234 million to the French company “Edenred” to provide food for millions of pupils entitled to free school meals. Given the Brexit slogan “Britain first”, awarding the contract to a French company seems weird. Regardless of this, many children and parents complained about the poor quality of the food and the small portions.
The companies “BFS Group” and “Brake Bros” were awarded a contract worth £208 million by direct procedure from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to deliver food parcels to vulnerable people who needed to shield and self-isolate.
The company, “Computacenter”, was awarded a £60 million contract by the Department for Education to provide computers for teachers working with disadvantaged children without tender or competition. The list could go on and on.
For more information, see:
Remarkably, how and why all these companies got their contracts is something neither Parliament nor the UK public knows.
A chumocracy indeed
These examples show widespread abuse of power by the Government throughout the pandemic. It is evil and morally reprehensible to provide lucrative contracts to friends and donors by bypassing the bidding process with the sole argument that the current emergency requires it. But it is not so easy to prove that this is the case.
The National Audit Office, which audits the financial integrity and value for money of government spending, has found evidence that companies with political links to the Tories have been favoured in the award of PPE contracts. However, the watchdog refused to publish the list of 493 contractors in the VIP trail after the Department of Health and the Cabinet Office blocked the release of the names. The National Audit Office argued that releasing the information would damage the relationship between the National Audit Office and the Government.
Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, aptly commented: “It is very worrying when the National Audit Office – a body supposed to ensure that public money is spent properly – makes its role dependent on having a good relationship with those who do the spending. How can we trust it to uncover wrongdoing if it only does so with consent?”
Source: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/uk-government-blocked-release-of-companies-in-vip-covid-lane/ 20 May 2021.
MPs, journalists and campaigners have spent months trying to get this list of company names, accusing the Government of nepotism.
The Good Law Project, a donor-funded campaign group that challenges the Government’s spending habits in the courts, has been trying to get this information since January 2021, citing the Freedom of Information Act. At last, on 18 October 2021, the Information Management Office ruled that the Government must provide this information and reveal the names of the companies given VIP access to multi-million pound PPE contracts.
Since then, this has been done somewhat hesitantly and only in a piecemeal fashion. A most unsatisfactory information policy!
The Good Law Project staff also question the continued use of private emails and messaging apps by the Prime Minister, former Health Minister Matt Hancock, Lord Bethell and other senior decision-makers. They argue that this goes right to the heart of their fight for greater transparency in government decision-making. Conducting government business outside official channels violates ministers’ legal obligation to keep official records, including important decisions; it seriously undermines their ability to comply with disclosure obligations, to which they are bound under the Freedom of Information Act.
In one of several lawsuits in which the Good Law Project holds the Government to account, the judge found no clear legal evidence of corruption and nepotism. However, the judge ruled that the Ministry of Health had breached its legal obligation by failing to publish details of contracts within 30 days of signing them.
The Government defended its action by saying that the contracts were legal and that the suspension of the competition process was justified because of the emergency health situation. Matt Hancock, the then Health Minister, even stated on the Andrew Marr TV show that he did not care that he had broken the law and used the killer argument that he had saved lives by doing so.
Source: Coronavirus: ‘Right’ to delay contract transparency in pandemic, says Hancock. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56145490. 21 February 2021.
However, as many of the above examples show, there were blunders among them that definitely did not save any lives. Some contracts would not have cost lives if there were a procurement process or competition. Instead, it seems that Tory policy-makers like to evade public scrutiny, settle deals among themselves and sit out any failures casually, as it is usually the citizens of the country who suffer.
This approach towards the pandemic is unethical but not illegal. It is unbelievable that the Government gets away with its blatant malpractice and cronyism.
Yet the Good Law Project’s Sisyphus work continues. Moreover, more and more people in the UK are angry, frustrated, upset, and resisting these government officials’ elitist, autocratic behaviour.
(LL)
For more information, see below.
My analysis is divided into several areas and includes:
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