Court ruling highlights serious risks posed by COVID ‘VIP-lane’

Anti-corruption campaigners have today welcomed a High Court ruling ordering PPE Medpro to repay £122 million after breaching a government contract to supply surgical gowns during the pandemic.

Daniel Bruce, Chief Executive, Transparency International UK, said:

“Today’s ruling highlights the serious flaws of the now infamous ‘VIP lane’ for COVID contracts. While most prospective suppliers went through the usual channels, a select group of the politically-connected were allowed to bypass normal scrutiny. This resulted in higher costs for taxpayers, undermined public trust and delivered £1 billion in PPE deemed not fit for purpose.

“Our research has shown more than £15 billion worth of pandemic contracts bore multiple corruption red flags - a scale that cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence or incompetence. The UK’s COVID procurement response was undermined by systemic weaknesses and political choices that created space for cronyism to flourish, compounded by a lack of transparency. To our knowledge, no other country adopted a mechanism like the VIP lane in their pandemic response.

“The court’s decision makes it abundantly clear that an approach which favoured newly set up companies with no past experience of supplying PPE was likely to lead to significant failures at great cost to the taxpayer’’

Previous research by Transparency International UK identified 135 high-risk contracts with a value of £15.3 billion with three or more corruption red flags.

We continue to call for robust investigation of and, where appropriate, recovery efforts for the other high risk contracts we identified and for the government to progress its open contracting ambitions, deploying technology to streamline buying goods and services, while improving financial accountability.

We also urge government to ban the use of VIP lanes or similar politically-biased mechanisms through further reforms to procurement legislation; a measure the Labour party committed to in opposition.