My Lords—oh, I have just thrown all my papers on the ground. Actually, I do not need them. I am holding my list of government amendments, which I used to follow the Minister carefully as he went through them all so that I did not miss anything he said.
I sincerely thank the officials, who have spent a long time bearing with me and my noble friend Lord Coaker, going through the government amendments carefully so that we properly understood the implications and which ones were tied together, if you like. Many of the amendments provide helpful clarification, so I put on record my sincere thanks for the officials’ time and patience. It has been very important.
I have a few amendments in this group. The first, Amendment 101A, looks to ensure that contracting authorities consider potential health contractors’ records of ensuring
“affordable access to their products in low and middle-income countries and to the NHS”.
Of course, this is in the light of the pandemic, because it covers consideration being taken in public health emergencies of the international concern around this and the impact on countries that are less well off than us. With these amendments, we want to increase access to vaccines, medicines and diagnostics by attaching conditions to health products and research and development contracts in order to facilitate global manufacturing, because that was clearly a problem recently during the Covid pandemic.
It is also about having assurances that taxpayers’ money is being spent according to socially responsible principles in circumstances like that. If you can attach conditions to public spending on health procurement and R&D to have greater access to health technologies globally, this can help to bring the health crisis to an end sooner. We know that many of the Covid variants came about in countries that have very low vaccination rates. So it is about looking out and upwards for the future.
There is already some precedent for attaching conditions to pandemic tools to improve access. Paragraph 84 of the Government’s 100 Days Mission report says:
“We recommend that governments should build in conditions into their DTV funding arrangements to ensure … access to DTVs at not for profit and scale, which is to be enacted if a PHEIC is declared.”
So we can do this if we want to. The pricing and timing of delivery are important for gaining more equitable distribution.
Many low-income and middle-income countries have been calling for more meaningful control over their pandemic responses. Of course, they cannot really do that if they do not have access and are not then able to manufacture their own vaccines, which is what many of them were calling for. Again, if you remove intellectual property barriers, you can do this, but we need to look carefully at how we would manage that. Perhaps the Procurement Bill is not the right place for this, but it is certainly the right place to have a discussion and debate about it and to look at how we can move things forward.
My other amendments are Amendments 528A and 528B. I am slightly confused about why we are debating these and Amendment 528C of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, at this stage, when the government Amendment 528, to which they relate, does not come up for debate until group 14. It strikes me that we are likely to end up having exactly the same debate all over again. The Minister may not have an explanation for that, but I apologise in advance that we will revisit this.
I will be brief because we will come back to this. As I say, Amendment 528A is again about affordable access for middle-income and low-income countries, and Amendment 528B is about requiring contracting authorities to consider a potential health contractor’s
record of ensuring affordable access to its products. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, for supporting our amendments. We support Amendment 528C of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, but I am sure that we will have another debate on group 14, as I said.
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Briefly, on the other amendments, I support my noble friend Lady Thornton on her Amendment 122A. She suggested that there needs to be an explanation around what her amendment is trying to achieve; I will be interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on that. The noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, was supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, on the absolute importance of environment and net-zero targets and how they must be interwoven in the Procurement Bill. I am sure that the Minister has got the message that many people in the Committee think that this is pretty important and must be engaged with.
The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, spoke to Amendment 124A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. It is important because it refers to the devolved settlement and the implications on that. I thank the Law Society of Scotland for its briefing on this, which was extremely helpful. The noble Lord made the points absolutely crystal clear so I will not go into any further detail.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for her sterling work in introducing all the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. I am sure that he will be extremely pleased when he reads Hansard, though perhaps not about one of the amendments in the former group.
The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, made some really important points when talking to his amendments about the need to support small suppliers and the issues that many have with prompt payment. I know that the Bill is looking hard at doing something around late payment and prompt payment; I hope that we can achieve this positively through what we are doing today. I fully support the noble Lord in his efforts to improve this situation.