Since the pandemic started, an emergency exemption to procurement laws has allowed the government to award contracts without having to give different companies a chance to bid for them.
The measure has resulted in numerous COVID contracts being awarded without competition, or with terms being kept secret, or other measures which bypass normal transparency requirements.
Earlier this year, openDemocracy revealed that a healthcare company ultimately controlled by leading Tory donor and former party chairman, Lord Ashcroft, received a £350m contract as part of the government’s COVID-19 vaccination roll-out.
“There are now very serious questions for the government to answer, with more than a fifth of the money spent on purchases in response to the pandemic raising red flags.
“We must now have full accountability for the eye-watering amounts of taxpayers’ money spent on the response,” said Daniel Bruce, chief executive of Transparency International UK.
Labour’s shadow cabinet office minister, Rachel Reeves, said that “the scale of corruption risk to vast amounts of taxpayer money revealed in this report is shocking, as is the evidence of endemic cronyism flowing through the government’s contracting.”
The Cabinet Office said, “During the pandemic our priority has always been to protect the public and save lives, and we have used existing rules to buy life saving equipment and supplies, such as PPE for the NHS front line.
All PPE procurement went through the same assurance process and due diligence is carried out on every contract – ministers have no role in awarding them.”
