Boris Johnson’s government is facing a fresh legal battle over its procurement processes during the Covid-19 pandemic, following claims it awarded a £102.6m contract for protective face masks without competition or contract details being published in line with official guidance.
The Good Law Project, a not-for-profit campaign group, said on Tuesday it was initiating legal action against the government over a lucrative deal to supply face masks to a company called Pharmaceuticals Direct.
The campaign group claims that although the contract was awarded in July 2020, the government failed to publish any details until March this year despite official guidelines requiring contract data to be published within 30 days of it being awarded.
Jo Maugham, director of Good Law Project, said the award made “nonsense” of Johnson’s claim in parliament in February that all Covid-19 contracts were “on the record”.
“The first lockdown ended in June. How can we still have needed PPE so urgently as to award a vast £100m+ PPE contract without any competition in July?,” he said.
The BBC reported that Samir Jassal, a former Conservative party parliamentary candidate, councillor and donor, was named on the original contract notice as being the “supplier’s contact”.
However, Pharmaceuticals Direct has said that although it had “engaged a contractor” . . . ..“that contractor is not Mr Jassal. For the avoidance of doubt, neither was Mr Jassal employed by PDL.”
It added that it “offered its assistance through the online government portal and progressed through the tender process, including product quality and technical triage stages”. It said it had fulfilled the contract and “to the best of its knowledge all masks supplied have been distributed to and put to use by the NHS”. Jassal was unavailable for comment.
The Department of Health and Social Care said: “All PPE procurement went through the same assurance process and, in conjunction with those checks, due diligence is carried out on every contract with ministers having no involvement in deciding who is awarded them.”
Competition and transparency in public services contracts is considered essential to ensuring good value for taxpayers. But there is growing concern that the government is continuing to award contracts without competition more than a year after the pandemic started.
According to Spend Network, a consultancy that analyses global contracting, the government has published details of £19bn of work awarded without competitive tender in the year to March 23, although the true number is expected to be much higher given that the government has failed to publish contracts within the 30 day notice period.
Just £723m of contracts relating to the government’s test and trace programme have been published, according to Spend Network, even though the National Audit Office said last year the government was expected to spend £37bn on the programme, whose suppliers include the outsourcing company Serco.
Last year the government’s spending watchdog disclosed that suppliers put on a “VIP list”, through recommendations by MPs or senior officials, were 10 times more likely to receive contracts than other bidders.
Pedro Telles, associate professor in procurement law at Copenhagen Business School, told the Financial Times that the “vast majority” of contracts awarded in the past year may have been unlawfully granted by the government given the restrictive nature of the 2015 Public Contract regulations, which allow contracts to be awarded without any competition only when it is strictly necessary and an extreme emergency due to “unforeseeable” events.
The Good Law Project has issued several legal challenges over the government’s procurement practices during the pandemic. In February, a judge ruled that health secretary Matt Hancock had acted unlawfully by failing to publish multibillion-pound Covid-19 government contracts within the 30-day period following a case brought by the campaign group.