The UK government had awarded contracts worth nearly half a billion pounds for IT and telecoms related to the Covid-19 pandemic by the end of July, according to the National Audit Office (NAO).
The NAO said that 340 contracts for IT and telecoms worth £490 million had been awarded by central government departments and supporting bodies from the start of January to the end of July, in a report on government procurement during the pandemic.
It highlighted three data services contracts worth a total of £3 million awarded to Faculty Science, a company in which government minister Lord Agnew of Oulton owned shares valued at £90,000. The contracts were direct awards through the Crown Commercial Service’s G-Cloud framework and did not need reviewing by the Cabinet Office or HM Treasury, the two departments where Lord Agnew serves as a procurement minister.
“As such the minister of state at the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury would not be involved in the award of these contracts, and we found no evidence that the minister had been involved,” the report says, adding that Lord Agnew’s interest in Faculty Science has since ended. The register of members’ interests shows that he continues to own shares in a number of companies including technology suppliers.
Overall, the NAO analysed 8,652 contracts covering £18 billion of spending. More than £12 billion was spent on personal protective equipment, with a total of £16.2 billion running through the Department of Health and Social Care and its national bodies.
The report found that £10.5 billion of the total was awarded without competition, with most of the rest going through existing framework agreements. It recommended that transparency should be improved, including by awarding bodies publishing basic information on contracts within 90 days, something which it said has happened for just a quarter of those recorded by end-July and worth more than £25,000.
“At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, government had to procure large volumes of goods and services quickly whilst managing the increased risks this might entail,” said Gareth Davies, head of the NAO.
“While we recognise that these were exceptional circumstances, it remains essential that decisions are properly documented and made transparent if government is to maintain public trust that taxpayers' money is being spent appropriately and fairly. The evidence set out in our report shows that these standards of transparency and documentation were not consistently met in the first phase of the pandemic.”
Image by Helena Jankovičová Kováčová from Pixabay
