I will move on because I want to go through the ways in which the system was set up. I will move on to some of the case studies highlighted in the report. PestFix, a pest control supplier, was handed a contract worth £350 million for PPE. The Government contracted with PestFix to purchase 25 million FFP2 masks, which we now know did not meet the Government’s published PPE specifications at the time of the order. Only after 600,000 masks were completed and delivered did the Department communicate the problem to PestFix and alter the contract.
Ayanda Capital—a London-based investment firm whose senior adviser was Andrew Mills—was awarded a PPE contract worth £252 million. At the time, Mills was also an adviser to the Board of Trade, part of the Department for International Trade. The 50 million masks purchased from Ayanda Capital failed to meet NHS specifications and were never able to be used. The deal’s documentation failed to identify any conflicts of interest.
Other cases have come to light. P14 Medical, a small firm based in Stroud, Gloucestershire, which recorded significant losses in 2019, was handed a £156 million contract to import PPE from China. Its director is a Conservative councillor. PPE Medpro, which has already been mentioned and is run by Anthony Page, a business associate of Conservative peer Baroness Mone, was handed a £122 million contract weeks after it was set up. In fact, PPE Medpro was set up on the day that Page quit as secretary of the company that deals with Baroness Mone’s brand.
In another case, Spanish businessman Gabriel González Andersson received £21 million of taxpayer’s money for acting as an agent to an American jewellery designer who, despite the absence of relevant experience, received major contracts for the supply of PPE. The Health Secretary’s former neighbour, who runs a pub in his village and has no previous experience in medical supplies, was awarded a £30 million contract to make millions of plastic vials for covid tests. He first contacted the Health Secretary by WhatsApp.
It is not just in the procurement of PPE that the Government have serious questions to answer. Some £840,000 was handed to the communications company, Public First, to run focus groups. The contract for that work was awarded retrospectively. Public First was founded by husband and wife Mr Frayne and Ms Wolf in 2016. Both Frayne and Wolf have worked in senior positions at different times for the former Education Secretary, and now Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove).
The NAO stated:
“We found no documentation on the consideration of conflicts of interest, no recorded process for choosing the supplier, and no specific justification for using emergency procurement.”
The Government have tried to claim that the NAO report shows Ministers properly declared their interests and that there is no evidence of Ministers’ involvement in procurement decisions or contract management. The truth is that we just do not know what role Ministers played.
The Government’s only explanation is that this was an emergency and they were sourcing PPE as quickly as possible. Yes, the Government had to source PPE quickly—a problem of their own making. During years of cutbacks, emergency stockpiles of PPE dwindled and went out of date. The Government ignored warnings from their own advisers to buy missing equipment, and pandemic planning became yet another casualty of austerity and incompetence. It took Ministers until March to realise that the NHS supply chain, fragmented by years of marketisation, could not distribute PPE quickly enough to meet demand, which left Ministers scrambling to source PPE from elsewhere and overpaying by tens of billions of pounds.