The most in depth investigation of COVID-19 pandemic medical materials procurement under the Conservative government to-date has found evidence of corruption. After an analysis of over 5000 contracts across 400 public bodies, the report released by Transparency.org found several glaring issues.
Researchers from Transparency.org analysed a wide array of date. This included publicly available data on UK public contracting, official reports, litigation in the courts, and public interest journalism. They identified 135 high risk contracts with a value of £15.3 billion with three or more corruption red flags.
“The scale of corruption risk in the former government’s approach to spending public money during the years of the COVID pandemic was profound. That we find multiple red flags in more than £15 billion of contacts amounting to a third of all such spending points to more than coincidence or incompetence,” said Daniel Bruce, Chief Executive, Transparency International UK.
Four key issues identified
The report’s analysis of the government’s procurement contracts uncovered four key issues with how the conservative government handled the pandemic. Over 230,000 British citizens are estimated to have died due to COVID-19.
The report has identified billions of pounds of potentially mismanaged public contracts. This mismanagement may have resulted in lower quality healthcare and preventative measures in response to the pandemic.
- Political connections: at least 28 contracts worth £4.1 billion went to those with known political connections to government. This amounts to almost one in ten pounds spent on the pandemic response
- VIP Lane for PPE: 51 contracts worth a total of £4 billion went through the unlawful ‘VIP lane’, of which
- The government awarded 15 contracts worth £1.7 billion to politically connected suppliers
- Politicians in office at the time referred 24 contracts worth £1.7 billion.
- New inexperienced suppliers: eight contracts worth a total of £500 million went to suppliers no more than 100 days old.
- Uncompetitive procurement: the UK government awarded over £30.7 billion in high-value contracts lacking competition. THis is equivalent to almost two-thirds of all COVID-19 contracts by value.
Systemic issues and what to do next
The report amounts to a shocking indictment of public procurement under the previous Conservative government.
Bruce noted that the UK’s COVID procurement response had several serious problems. He added that political choices were made that allowed cronyism to thrive, all enabled by woefully inadequate public transparency. “As far as we can ascertain, no other country used a system like the UK’s VIP lane in their Covid response,” he added. “The cost to the public purse has already become increasingly clear with huge sums lost to unusable PPE from ill-qualified suppliers. We strongly urge the Covid-19 inquiries and planned Covid Corruption Commissioner to ensure full accountability and for the new government to swiftly implement lessons learned.”