I was looking at the results of that court case – you know the one where people say the government let contracts illegally. Actually it turns out there were three contracts used as examples. The one that gets the most press was for a sweet company to provide PPE. Actually the court case was about late publication of contract details.
So I looked in to the sweet company contract. It should have been published in 30 days, but it looks like it took the government department 40 days to publish the contract details. That was the thing that broke the law. The contract appears to have been published way back in late June.
But it was a sweet manufacturer – how come they got the contract – they had never made gowns. Okay – think back. Most PPE was coming from China. There were two types of contracts being let.
One was for home based manufacture. I can remember one of the best protective suits we bought was made by a handbag manufacturer. What you are looking for is the equipment companies have and whether they can be retasked to another purpose. But this wasn’t the type of contract this was.
The second type of contract was trying to fill the gap by importing from China as fast as possible. What they were looking for was companies that could manage import deals. For example a company with good trade links with China might just be able to leverage them to get priority deliveries of alternative equivalent. This was the type of contract with the sweet company.
They had set up an agreement with a supplier of non-sterile gowns from China. It was from a company that had been in the business and had accreditation for supplying PPE from the year before.
So was that what you understood from reports?
What was needed was a review of the contracts, not a review of whether being 10 days late publishing a document 6 months ago was legal.
I would rather the Good Law Project (by the way – check them out on wikipedia – the encyclopaedia of everything – with some notable exceptions) put the focus on the validity of the contracts, otherwise it just sounds like political spin to me.