It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Ms Eagle. I congratulate the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) on securing this important debate. I absolutely accept that there are issues, that procurement is extremely difficult and that lessons need to be learned.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate, and for the latter-day conversion of many Opposition Members to an interest in the area in question. Having sat on the Public Accounts Committee, I did not see many of them at the time, or over the past 18 months, raising this issue. However, I accept that there are issues to be raised, and I am keen to raise them. Unfortunately, while in my view the issues need to be raised in a spirit of constructiveness, that was not evident in the hon. Gentleman’s comments. They need to be understood with an acknowledgement of the context in which we work. Failure to understand those points means we will not push forward the discussion in a useful manner.
Having listened to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton I am afraid that the selective quotations from the NAO report, which I have also read, need to be corrected. He said that action was taken without the usual Cabinet Office spending controls, whereas, on page 11, the report states that
“we recognise that these were exceptional circumstances”.
The hon. Gentleman said that things were undertaken before any processes were standardised, yet, as the report states clearly on page 32, even before standardisation occurred civil servants were able to
“research and report on financial details of companies and the background details of company directors within four hours at the peak, and produced reports rating suppliers as red, amber or green.”
Nowhere in the report does the word “mismanagement” appear—not in any of the 48 pages.
The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton talked about dozens of experienced local suppliers being ignored. I had similar suppliers that I was sending in, but they were not ignored. Page 8 states that
“the Department of Health & Social Care and the Cabinet Office put in place a clearance board to approve PPE contracts more than £5 million. PPE procurements were subject to normal departmental spending controls, including HM Treasury approval”.
On page 9, the report states:
“The cross-government PPE team established an eight-stage process to assess and process offers of support to supply PPE”.
The hon. Gentleman made a strong statement that the system was rigged, and yet page 9 states that both lanes, including the high-priority lane,
“used the same eight-stage process to assess and process offers.”
I was on some of the calls—with Members in this room—where we all directed statements and leads into that lane, without any expectation of favours whatsoever, but recognising that we were trying to ensure the best for our hospitals and the people on the frontline dealing with such difficult times.
In the 19 seconds I have left, the question that the hon. Gentleman failed to answer was the strategic one. In a period of emergency there is a choice: to prioritise output or process. Ideally, both would be prioritised, but if I had a choice, I would make sure that the PPE was in my hospital. I hope that some of the Opposition Members here will answer that question in the coming hour.
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