My Lords, I have Amendment 48, but I very much endorse my noble friend Lady Thornton’s remarks on this subject. In the group before last, it was interesting to hear the Minister talk about what I thought was a hierarchy in terms of the balance to be drawn in making judgments about procurement. He put value for money at the highest level. My major problem with that is that my experience in the public sector, mainly in the health service but in other worlds too, is that that is translated into the lowest price.
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So in all the arguments that we will have on this group and on the other environmental groups on Wednesday—and which had on the previous two groups and a on group on the first day in Committee—the Minister will say that this is covered because in prioritising value for money and with the other areas that the Bill has mentioned and that the procurement statement will deal with, we need not worry that the balance is right. The problem is that if we do not trust public procurement to deliver some of these wider objectives, we have to seek that the Bill enables it to happen. There is very little evidence, as far as I can see, that public authorities ever really move away from lowest price. The Government will have to do an awful lot to convince us that delivering value for money or maximising public benefit will actually work in terms of the wider policy objectives we want to see.
My amendment would add economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being to the objectives currently set out in Clause 11. I take us back to our debate last week, when my noble friend Lord Coaker put it very well. He said that we have a great opportunity to use public procurement policy to help
“produce the country and society that we want. Many Governments and local authorities have failed to use the power of that purchasing to drive social change.”—[Official Report, 6/7/22; col. GC 285.]
He was absolutely right.
The recent report of the Committee on Climate Change to Parliament is surely a huge wake-up call on this. The committee essentially said that the UK is one of the few countries with many of the right policy ambitions and with emission targets in line with the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. However, the problem with the Government’s approach is that they do not have the policies to put in place the progress needed to meet the targets they have set. If they are really serious about probably the greatest challenge that we face, surely procurement is the way to do it. Yet, so far, they seem to be setting their face against it.
I was interested in the comments by the noble Lord, Lord True, last week. He essentially said that my noble friend was making a dangerous attempt by the Labour Party to constrain private companies that sought to provide—