My Lords, my name is on some of these amendments. My colleagues have spoken to several of them so I shall merely add a few things.
I was particularly concerned by the term “centralised”. The context in which we are operating is that England is by far the most centralised country in the developed world. The concept of a centralised procurement authority implies, “Whitehall tells the rest of you what to do”. For that reason, we think it important to put a number of phrases into the Bill emphasising that local authorities have a part to play. In particular, we should put here the idea that consortia of local authorities—for example, the local authorities of West Yorkshire operating together—have the ability to co-operate as centralised procurement authorities.
There will be a number of other occasions in the Bill where I and my colleagues will want to put in social enterprise, social values, non-profits and charities. They were strongly emphasised in the Green Paper and the consultation; they are not in the Bill. We think that including those elements will help to broaden the way in which Ministers and officials will approach outsourcing and public contracting. This relates also to the issues that my noble friend Lord Purvis raised about the international dimension and the importance of trade and co-operation agreements, and the point the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe,
made about the unbalanced way in which these occasionally operate: we are much more open to others than they are to us.
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I was very struck and, indeed, appalled at the outbreak of the Covid pandemic that one of the contracts for test and trace was given to a multinational company headquartered in Miami, Florida. It seemed so obvious that knowledge of the ground, local circumstances and where to put your test and trace things was held already by local public health officers across the country. The outsourcing then should probably have been done through local authorities and the services they could provide; giving it to a multinational with very little experience of operating in England was clearly counterfactual, counterintuitive and likely to be grossly inefficient, as indeed it proved. The importance of putting in the Bill that local authorities and consortia of local authorities can operate as these unfortunately named “centralised contracting authorities” is because we want to make sure that this does not end up with Whitehall and Ministers taking yet another large bite out of what used to be local autonomy and local initiative, and so that the Bill gives adequate space for those local contracting authorities and others to be involved as fully as possible.