Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
Nearly a third of all UK government contracts issued to fight the Covid pandemic carried a “high risk” of some form of corruption, according to Transparency International UK. The full extent of questionable Covid contracts is laid bare in a new report by TIUK which identifies 135 contracts worth a total of £15.3 billion that raised three or more “corruption red flags”, including conflicts of interest, opaque contracting and uncompetitive awards process. At least 28 contracts, worth £4.1 billion, were handed out to those with known political connections to the Conservatives, of which the now-infamous VIP lane accounted for £1.7 billion. The total sum includes contracts worth £14.9 billion issued by the Department of Health and Social Care as the pandemic swept through the NHS – more than was spent in total on Covid personal protective equipment (PPE).
The TIUK report, published today, criticises the UK’s poor record of public accounting in this period, saying “the published data was inconsistent, inaccurate, late, or at times missing entirely”. It gives the total sum disbursed by the government in Covid-related contracts as £48.1 billion.
According to the watchdog 141 high-value contracts, worth £5 billion in total, were published more than a year after being awarded – long after a 30-day legal deadline. By contrast, it took Ukraine less than one day to publish information on more than 100,000 Covid contracts at the peak of the crisis.
TIUK’s lengthy report is published as the new Labour government is recruiting a new Covid commissioner, who may be tasked with clawing back £2.6 billion in Covid spending – a sum Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has vowed to recover.
Whoever lands the three-day-a-week role will have an £84,000 salary and a “small team” of Treasury officials, and will report chiefly to the chancellor. The commissioner will also report to Parliament as part of a “lessons learned” approach.
Labour has insisted the position is more than “window dressing”; one source says Covid corruption is a “rare” issue that Reeves gets “properly angry about”.
