Deloitte
McKinsey
Serco
Sitel
Deloitte has particularly strong links with the Cabinet Office:
Deloitte has particularly strong links with the Cabinet Office:
Hiring Deloitte [to manage PPE procurement] was a funny thing to do. If there is a fire, you don’t call the auditor, you call the fire service.
Deloitte is among the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms that have been given key responsibilities in the government’s COVID-19 response as part of a fast-track scheme in which contracts – and the sums involved – remain hidden
Management consultancy firms Deloitte and McKinsey and outsourcing multinationals Serco and Sitel are among those that have been given millions without competitive tender to help the government oversee the crisis.
Examples where Whitehall departments had failed to explain why they chose a particular supplier or document possible conflicts of interest.
A number of firms given contracts without tender have later been found to have close links to the Conservative Party, prompting accusations of cronyism.
One small, loss-making firm run by a Conservative councillor in Stroud was given a £156 million contract to import PPE from China without any competition, concerns over gaps in the documentation of COVID contracts. Steve Dechan, a Tory councillor in Stroud, signed the contract in May despite having suffered financial losses in 2019, openDemocracy reported. The firm's track-record in importing PPE is not clear.
Dechan stood down from the council in August, but previously made headlines when P14 Medical was given a contract worth nearly £120m to supply face shields to the UK Government. The £156m contract for gowns was signed in May, but details were only made public last September.Deloitte is among the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms that have been given key responsibilities in the government’s COVID-19 response as part of a fast-track scheme in which contracts – and the sums involved – remain hidden
Management consultancy firms Deloitte and McKinsey and outsourcing multinationals Serco and Sitel are among those that have been given millions without competitive tender to help the government oversee the crisis.
Examples where Whitehall departments had failed to explain why they chose a particular supplier or document possible conflicts of interest.
A number of firms given contracts without tender have later been found to have close links to the Conservative Party, prompting accusations of cronyism.
One small, loss-making firm run by a Conservative councillor in Stroud was given a £156 million contract to import PPE from China without any competition, concerns over gaps in the documentation of COVID contracts. Steve Dechan, a Tory councillor in Stroud, signed the contract in May despite having suffered financial losses in 2019, openDemocracy reported. The firm's track-record in importing PPE is not clear.
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/tory-ally-who-won-ppe-bonanza-buys-third-home-and-one-for-parents/29/11/
By 10 March, it was clear that Covid-19 was a massive problem. Public health experts were frantically urging the government to take action. The epidemiology professor Neil Ferguson estimated that 20,000 lives would have been saved if the government had locked down a week earlier than it did. Many events had already been cancelled, for fear of spreading the disease.
Then we watched aghast as the Cheltenham Festival went ahead, and 250,000 people packed the terraces “like sardines”. It appears to have been a super-spreader event, blamed by some for a spike in infections and deaths.
The racing connection might not have commended her to doctors, but could it have commended her to the health secretary, Matt Hancock? For a long time Hancock, the MP for Newmarket, where the Jockey Club has major infrastructure and investments, has drawn a large proportion of his political funding from the horse-racing industry. An investigation by the Mirror estimates that he has received £350,000 in donations from wealthy people in the racing business. Before the last election he announced: “I’ll always support the wonderful sport of horse racing.”
Harding’s appointment is not the only intersection between racing and tracing. The Jockey Club’s premier annual event is the Grand National. Or, to give it its full title, the Randox Health Grand National. One of the government’s most controversial contracts is with Randox. It gave the global healthcare firm a £133m deal, without advertisement or competition, to supply testing kits.
Randox employs as a consultant the former Conservative environment secretary Owen Paterson. It pays him £100,000 a year for 200 hours of work. Neither he, nor Randox, nor the health department answered the Guardian’s questions about whether he had helped to secure this deal. In July, following a series of errors, the government withdrew Randox testing kits, on the grounds that they might be unsafe.
These apparent connections may be entirely coincidental. But in an emergency, when decisions must be made with the utmost rigour and a relentless focus on public health, there should be no possibility that other interests might intrude, or that ministerial judgment should in any way be clouded.
Like so much surrounding this pandemic, the identity of Harding’s team at NHS track and trace was withheld from the public, until it was leaked to the Health Service Journal last month. Clinicians were astonished to discover that there is only one public health expert on its executive committee. There is space, however, for a former executive from Jaguar Land Rover, a senior manager from Travelex and an executive from Waitrose. Harding’s adviser at the agency is Alex Birtles, who, like her, previously worked for TalkTalk. She has subsequently made a further appointment to the board: Mike Coupe, an executive at another of her old firms, Sainsbury’s.
The “world-beating” test-and-trace system she oversees has repeatedly failed to reach its targets. Staff were scarcely trained. Patients have been directed to nonexistent testing centres, or to the other end of the country. A vast tranche of test results was lost. Thousands of people, including NHS staff, have been left in limbo, unable to work because they can’t get tests or the results of tests.
Having demonstrated, to almost everyone’s dissatisfaction, that she was the wrong person for the job, Harding has now been given an even bigger role, as head of the National Institute for Health Protection, to run concurrently with the first one. This is the government’s replacement for Public Health England, which it blames for its own disasters. Harding’s appointment looks to me like a reward for failure.
Perhaps it is just a coincidence that Health minister Edward Argar is a former Serco lobbyist and that Serco’s boss Rupert Soames is brother of former Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames.
The head of Serco, Rupert Soames, is the grandson of Winston Churchill and the brother of a former Tory MP. His wife, Camilla, is a Conservative party donor. An email of his, leaked in June, suggested that the coronavirus pandemic could go “a long way in cementing the position of private sector companies in the public sector supply chain”. It seems to me that the emergency is being leveraged by the government for this purpose. Our crisis is the privatiser’s opportunity.
The government has bypassed the lean and efficient NHS to create an outsourced, privatised system characterised by incompetence and failure. The system’s waste is measured not just in pounds, but in human lives. It is measured in mass unemployment, economic crisis, grief, isolation, long-term illness and avoidable death. So much for the efficiencies of privatisation
Does cronyism cost lives?EXC: A former Tory councillor who secured £276m in PPE contracts has bought a £250k holiday home in Cornwall and a house for his parents
— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) November 29, 2020
Steve Dechan also bought £1.5m Cotswolds home and and paid himself £500k
He said he'd done "very well" out of Covid https://t.co/u9cARSboaD
Just under half of contracts worth more than £25,000 awarded up to the end of July have still not been published. It was reported last month that of £11 billion in public money handed to private firms between April and September, £3 billion remains unaccounted for.
MPs and transparency campaigners have criticised the government for failing to put in place penalty clauses in contracts for poor performance.
Several firms involved in the government’s test and trace programme were awarded fresh contracts despite concerns that the scheme was failing to reduce the spread of the virus.
If you are not incandescent with rage, you haven’t grasped the scale of what has been done to us. The new surge in the coronavirus, and the restrictions and local lockdowns it has triggered, are caused in large part by the catastrophic failure of the test-and-trace system. Its £12bn budget has been blown, as those in charge of it have failed to drive the infection rate below the critical threshold.
Their failure was baked in, caused by the government’s ideological commitment to the private sector. This commitment had three impacts: money that could have saved lives has been diverted into corporate profits; inexperienced consultants and executives have been appointed over the heads of qualified public servants; instead of responsive local systems, the government has created a centralised monster.
This centralisation is perhaps the hardest aspect to understand. All experience here and abroad shows that local test and trace works better. While, according to the latest government figures, the centralised system currently reaches just 62.6% of contacts, local authorities are reaching 97%. This is despite the fact that they have been denied access to government data, and were given just £300m, in contrast with the £12bn for national test and trace. Centralisation may be a catastrophe, but it does enable huge contracts for multinational corporations.
The Conservative mantra, repeated for 40 years like a stuck record, is that the public sector is wasteful and inefficient while the private sector is lean and competitive. Yet the waste and inefficiency caused by privatising essential public health functions is off the scale. This isn’t like rail or water privatisation, where failure has caused dysfunction within a single public service. This is about the escalating collapse of national life.
The government’s irrational obsession with the private sector is symbolised by its appointment of Dido Harding to run NHS test and trace. She worked at McKinsey, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, and as chief executive of TalkTalk. After a disastrous hack of the TalkTalk database, exposing both the details of 4 million customers and Harding’s ignorance of the technology, she acquired the moniker Dido, queen of carnage. In 2014 David Cameron, an old friend, made her a baroness; she sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer.
MPs and transparency campaigners have criticised the government for failing to put in place penalty clauses in contracts for poor performance.
Several firms involved in the government’s test and trace programme were awarded fresh contracts despite concerns that the scheme was failing to reduce the spread of the virus.
If you are not incandescent with rage, you haven’t grasped the scale of what has been done to us. The new surge in the coronavirus, and the restrictions and local lockdowns it has triggered, are caused in large part by the catastrophic failure of the test-and-trace system. Its £12bn budget has been blown, as those in charge of it have failed to drive the infection rate below the critical threshold.
Their failure was baked in, caused by the government’s ideological commitment to the private sector. This commitment had three impacts: money that could have saved lives has been diverted into corporate profits; inexperienced consultants and executives have been appointed over the heads of qualified public servants; instead of responsive local systems, the government has created a centralised monster.
This centralisation is perhaps the hardest aspect to understand. All experience here and abroad shows that local test and trace works better. While, according to the latest government figures, the centralised system currently reaches just 62.6% of contacts, local authorities are reaching 97%. This is despite the fact that they have been denied access to government data, and were given just £300m, in contrast with the £12bn for national test and trace. Centralisation may be a catastrophe, but it does enable huge contracts for multinational corporations.
The Conservative mantra, repeated for 40 years like a stuck record, is that the public sector is wasteful and inefficient while the private sector is lean and competitive. Yet the waste and inefficiency caused by privatising essential public health functions is off the scale. This isn’t like rail or water privatisation, where failure has caused dysfunction within a single public service. This is about the escalating collapse of national life.
The government’s irrational obsession with the private sector is symbolised by its appointment of Dido Harding to run NHS test and trace. She worked at McKinsey, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, and as chief executive of TalkTalk. After a disastrous hack of the TalkTalk database, exposing both the details of 4 million customers and Harding’s ignorance of the technology, she acquired the moniker Dido, queen of carnage. In 2014 David Cameron, an old friend, made her a baroness; she sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer.
It would be wrong to claim she had no experience relevant to the pandemic. She sits on the board of the Jockey Club, which runs some of the biggest and most lucrative horse racing events in the UK. Among them is the Cheltenham Festival.
 |
| Illustration: Guardian Design |
Then we watched aghast as the Cheltenham Festival went ahead, and 250,000 people packed the terraces “like sardines”. It appears to have been a super-spreader event, blamed by some for a spike in infections and deaths.
The racing connection might not have commended her to doctors, but could it have commended her to the health secretary, Matt Hancock? For a long time Hancock, the MP for Newmarket, where the Jockey Club has major infrastructure and investments, has drawn a large proportion of his political funding from the horse-racing industry. An investigation by the Mirror estimates that he has received £350,000 in donations from wealthy people in the racing business. Before the last election he announced: “I’ll always support the wonderful sport of horse racing.”
Harding’s appointment is not the only intersection between racing and tracing. The Jockey Club’s premier annual event is the Grand National. Or, to give it its full title, the Randox Health Grand National. One of the government’s most controversial contracts is with Randox. It gave the global healthcare firm a £133m deal, without advertisement or competition, to supply testing kits.
Randox employs as a consultant the former Conservative environment secretary Owen Paterson. It pays him £100,000 a year for 200 hours of work. Neither he, nor Randox, nor the health department answered the Guardian’s questions about whether he had helped to secure this deal. In July, following a series of errors, the government withdrew Randox testing kits, on the grounds that they might be unsafe.
These apparent connections may be entirely coincidental. But in an emergency, when decisions must be made with the utmost rigour and a relentless focus on public health, there should be no possibility that other interests might intrude, or that ministerial judgment should in any way be clouded.
Like so much surrounding this pandemic, the identity of Harding’s team at NHS track and trace was withheld from the public, until it was leaked to the Health Service Journal last month. Clinicians were astonished to discover that there is only one public health expert on its executive committee. There is space, however, for a former executive from Jaguar Land Rover, a senior manager from Travelex and an executive from Waitrose. Harding’s adviser at the agency is Alex Birtles, who, like her, previously worked for TalkTalk. She has subsequently made a further appointment to the board: Mike Coupe, an executive at another of her old firms, Sainsbury’s.
The “world-beating” test-and-trace system she oversees has repeatedly failed to reach its targets. Staff were scarcely trained. Patients have been directed to nonexistent testing centres, or to the other end of the country. A vast tranche of test results was lost. Thousands of people, including NHS staff, have been left in limbo, unable to work because they can’t get tests or the results of tests.
Having demonstrated, to almost everyone’s dissatisfaction, that she was the wrong person for the job, Harding has now been given an even bigger role, as head of the National Institute for Health Protection, to run concurrently with the first one. This is the government’s replacement for Public Health England, which it blames for its own disasters. Harding’s appointment looks to me like a reward for failure.
Serco was awarded contracts for Track and Trace, which could be worth up to £410 million. This was despite being fined £19.2 million by the Serious Fraud Office last year for misconduct in relation to a previous government contract.
 |
| Health minister Edward Argar |
Since Serco has limited expertise in contact tracing it subcontracted the work to thirty or so subcontractors, who employed contact tracing staff, sometimes on zero hours contracts. The continuing underperformance of the government’s track and system, seen as a fiasco in many quarters, has enabled the continuing spread of the virus
The test-and-trace system might be a public health fiasco, but it’s a private profit bonanza. Consultants at one of the companies involved have each been earning £6,000 a day. Massive contracts have been awarded without competitive tendering. Astonishingly, at least one of these, worth £410m and issued to Serco, contains no penalty clause:
Though this is an issue of great public interest, the contracts have been shrouded in secrecy. We have not been allowed to discover how the contractors were chosen, or why the government has repeatedly appointed them without competition. Time and again, in contracts for both the test-and-trace programme and protective equipment, sums of £108m have been disbursed. No one can explain why this magic number keeps recurring. Does it lie just below some threshold of accountability? Or is the government simply handing out standard wads of money to favoured companies, regardless of the cost of their work?
What is this about? Why is failure rewarded? Why are contracts issued with so little accountability or transparency? There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but you might expect the government’s Anti-Corruption Champion to investigate. Or perhaps not. He is John Penrose MP, Dido Harding’s husband.
The anti-corruption champion sits on the advisory board of a thinktank called 1828. It campaigned ferociously against Public Health England, on the grounds that its efforts to regulate junk food and reduce obesity “curtail personal liberty and undermine parental responsibility”: a standard industry talking point. It called for the body to be scrapped: this happened, and Penrose’s wife is running its replacement. It claims that “the NHS’s record is deplorable” and proposes that it be replaced with a social health insurance system. It champions the idea of outsourcing patients to the Cayman Islands for treatment. When I asked the thinktank who its major funders are, it told me, “1828 does not disclose information regarding donations.”
Penrose and Harding met when they were both employed as consultants at McKinsey. You’d never guess which company got the contract for advising on the “vision, purpose and narrative” of the National Institute for Health Protection, the new body that Harding runs. OK, you would. McKinsey was paid £563,000. Again, this work was neither advertised nor subject to competitive tender. I expect Penrose will look into it.
Even if Serco fails to fulfil its terms, it gets paid in full. Serco has indeed missed its targets, achieving an average by September of only 58.6% of contacts traced, against the 80% it was meant to reach..@DavidDavisMP tells @peston that he was shocked to hear that there was no penalty clause in place with the Track & Trace contracts, making it harder for the Govt to hold companies like SERCO to account without one #Peston pic.twitter.com/XKJLx9BGKp
— Peston (@itvpeston) October 14, 2020
Though this is an issue of great public interest, the contracts have been shrouded in secrecy. We have not been allowed to discover how the contractors were chosen, or why the government has repeatedly appointed them without competition. Time and again, in contracts for both the test-and-trace programme and protective equipment, sums of £108m have been disbursed. No one can explain why this magic number keeps recurring. Does it lie just below some threshold of accountability? Or is the government simply handing out standard wads of money to favoured companies, regardless of the cost of their work?
What is this about? Why is failure rewarded? Why are contracts issued with so little accountability or transparency? There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but you might expect the government’s Anti-Corruption Champion to investigate. Or perhaps not. He is John Penrose MP, Dido Harding’s husband.
Penrose and Harding met when they were both employed as consultants at McKinsey. You’d never guess which company got the contract for advising on the “vision, purpose and narrative” of the National Institute for Health Protection, the new body that Harding runs. OK, you would. McKinsey was paid £563,000. Again, this work was neither advertised nor subject to competitive tender. I expect Penrose will look into it.
The head of Serco, Rupert Soames, is the grandson of Winston Churchill and the brother of a former Tory MP. His wife, Camilla, is a Conservative party donor. An email of his, leaked in June, suggested that the coronavirus pandemic could go “a long way in cementing the position of private sector companies in the public sector supply chain”. It seems to me that the emergency is being leveraged by the government for this purpose. Our crisis is the privatiser’s opportunity.
The government has bypassed the lean and efficient NHS to create an outsourced, privatised system characterised by incompetence and failure. The system’s waste is measured not just in pounds, but in human lives. It is measured in mass unemployment, economic crisis, grief, isolation, long-term illness and avoidable death. So much for the efficiencies of privatisation
Why has the UK the highest COVID death rate in Europe?
One answer may lie in the way the government has awarded contracts for key areas like the supply of PPE (vital for health and care staff, to avoid hospitals and care homes becoming super-spreaders) and test, track and trace (the key to successfully managing COVID-19 in countries as diverse as Taiwan and New Zealand, Germany and South Korea).
However, here in the UK the government repeatedly insisted on awarding contracts for PPE and for test, track and trace, often without any competitive process, to individuals and organisations with Conservative Party links rather than proven expertise in public health. It seems to have been a case of who you know, not what you know.
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