“Record keeping in Government” By Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee

I sometimes describe the PAC’s role as “keeping them honest” – every penny of taxpayers’ money spent must be accounted for and decision-makers held accountable. But for this, transparency and good record-keeping is vital. Responsible governments prepare for emergencies and have in place contingencies for events like a pandemic. ­­­­­­­­­The COVID-19 pandemic required an emergency response but acting fast did not give the Government license to act fast and loose with taxpayers’ money. It is simply not good enough to throw overboard basic procedures and due diligence in a crisis.

Much of the £13 billion of taxpayers’ money spent on sourcing PPE was wasted on unusable or substandard PPE and, in some cases, on fraudulent contracts. The Department for Health and Social Care is, rightly, attempting to claw back some of this money and £2.7 billion worth of PPE contracts are currently being disputed. But as the National Audit Office revealed, many contracts were awarded owing to recommendation via an obscure, email “VIP lane”, without an audit trail or evidence of rationale. Apart from the deleterious impact on trust, poor record-keeping and shoddy due diligence at the beginning of contract negotiations mean the Government is now paralysed from acting at all in some cases.

In the case of DHSC’s award of contracts worth £776.9 million to the COVID-19 testing company Randox, basic records about the details of the contractual negotiations and due diligence do not exist. There are no records of whether simple practices such as price benchmarking (when prices are compared with competitors), were followed. Numerous high-level meetings between ministers and Randox were held, but what exactly was discussed at some of these is unknown. These meetings were not properly declared and minutes for the vast majority were not kept. It leaves the role that ministers had in approving the contracts confused and unclear. There is no evidence that contracts were awarded to Randox improperly, but shoddy record-keeping means there’s precious little evidence to see.

That there was such opaque decision-making on spending large sums of taxpayers’ money, even at a time of crisis, is shocking. Instead of following accountable, transparent processes government business has been conducted using private email communications that neither government officials nor the National Audit Office were able to scrutinise. At the start of the pandemic a shocking picture emerged of ‘government by Whatsapp’ in the ventilator challenge, with prominent connected individuals revealed to be negotiating about tax and employment measures via text, direct with senior ministers.

In words quoted by a previous Prime Minister, “sunlight is the best disinfectant”, but all this casts a murky shadow. Important, and expensive, decisions were made during the Government’s response to the pandemic but in many cases, taxpayers are being left in the dark. This is not an exercise in propriety – records are institutional learning. Wider data management failures arguably underpinned many of the incredibly costly pandemic response failures, and the Committee has noted the surprising failure of the Government to learn from the financial crisis in its economic response to Covid-19. The further failure to record the learning process that occurred during the huge spending decisions of the pandemic mean these problems are much more likely recur in addressing oncoming crises – suddenly not an issue for the future but already hard upon us. In its Report on the Government’s contracts with Randox, the PAC called on the DHSC to set out details of when and how it will bring its record-keeping up to standard and crucially to ensure that this is the case in every and all circumstances.

Getting to the bottom of what happened and how certain decisions were reached during the pandemic has been difficult, requiring sustained effort from the National Audit Office, select committees, lawyers, journalists and wider civil society. Early indications of multi-million pound government contracts for legal and communications services in preparation for the COVID-19 public inquiry suggest this could be one of the most expensive statutory inquiries yet. And yet it is unclear that these hefty sums spent will increase transparency or clarity. The public inquiry may yet have its work cut out for it