UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock owns a large number of shares in a company which has been awarded National Health Service contracts. But according to the Department of Health and Social Care (the ministry he heads), he has behaved “entirely properly”.
Has he, though? Has he really? If so then the state’s definition of acceptable behaviour for government ministers and the general public’s definition thereof must be at least a million miles apart.
True it may be that by the Augean standards of government procurement scandals this one is relatively small beer.
It goes like this: Hancock has a 15 per cent shareholding in his sister’s company Topwood Ltd, which specialises in waste disposal services. This year it won a £300,000 contract from NHS Wales and it also has ‘approved status’ to provide services to NHS England too, though so far it hasn’t won any contracts.
You could argue that however much Hancock eventually makes it won’t nearly be in the league of the £60 million that former Prime Minister David Cameron stood to make from his own dubious involvement with another company trying to get a place on the government hand-out gravy train.
Also, it’s true that Hancock’s remit as Health Secretary for England does not include contracts for NHS Wales.
But still there is lots about Hancock’s business arrangement that doesn’t pass the sniff test.
For example, Topwood successfully won its tender to secure a place on an NHS Shared Business Services framework for “confidential waste destruction and disposal” at the beginning of 2019. But as the trade website HSJ (‘For Healthcare Leaders’) points out, Hancock was appointed Health and Social Care Secretary six months earlier in July 2018.
How could it not have been clear to Hancock that there was a potential conflict of interest here?
Hancock’s failure to declare any conflicts of interest in his parliamentary members’ register looks distinctly fishy – especially when you consider the wider context of the government’s scandalously inefficient, haphazard and cronyish Covid-19 procurement contracts.
Earlier this year, a High Court judge found that Hancock had acted unlawfully for failing to publish the £18 billion worth of government Covid-19 contracts within the 30 days required by law. Again this might sound like a venial technicality. But not when you realise the scale of the cronyism, mismanagement and profligacy involved.
Here, courtesy of the Mail, is a reminder.
The NAO [National Audit Office] said it would launch an urgent investigation into one extraordinary deal for surgical gloves and gowns with a Florida-based jewellery designer where Spanish businessman, Michael Saiger, who served as a middleman, was paid an astonishing £21million in UK taxpayers’ cash.
The report – which came out last week, sparked claims the Government had frittered away huge sums of public in flawed and uncompetitive contracts, sometimes buying “useless PPE”, with the ‘taxpayer now reaping the ruin’.
In another case, Sabia Mokeddem, a 23-year-old investor from Lyon, France, was given £880,000 to supply 55,000 coveralls despite not having any experience in the sector.
She said she acted as a go-between for a wholesaler in Hong Kong and has since completed delivery of all the coveralls, priced at £16 each. Miss Mokkedem said the coveralls cost £11 before the pandemic – but they charged £16 as market demand and rising cargo costs pushed up prices.
Here is another example from Mail investigative reporter David Rose:
Take Jonathon Bennett. As the Mail reported this month, he is a veteran textile importer with extensive contacts in China, where most PPE is made. His bid to supply millions of masks in April was highly competitive – well below the Government’s ‘benchmark’ price.
But the £253million contract went to Ayanda Capital, a firm with no experience which was charging almost twice as much. Worse, 50 million of their masks were of the wrong design.
And let us not forget the £30 million contract (for supplying the NHS with test tubes and funnels) awarded to the bloke who ran Matt Hancock’s local pub, even though the landlord in question had no previous experience providing medical supplies.
It’s starting very much to look as if for those within the Boris Johnson administration’s magic circle, the Chinese coronavirus pandemic is not a crisis but a money-making opportunity that would make Robert Mugabe blush.
But I’m not sure that those who will end up on the hook for these stupendous payouts – taxpayers – will be quite so enthusiastic. Indeed, they’ll probably think, as I do, that it’s about time the grinning chancer Hancock did the only decent thing he has ever done in his entire life — and resigned immediately.
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