Corruption ‘red flags’ have been uncovered in government Covid contracts worth more than £15 billion, a report by Transparency International UK has found.
The review of more than 5,000 contracts across 400 public bodies has identified 135 high-risk contracts where investigation is merited due to the identification of three or more corruption question marks.
At least 28 contracts worth £4.1 billion went to people with known political connections to the Conservative Party, accounting for almost a tenth of the money spent on the pandemic response as a whole.
Fifty-one contracts, meanwhile, went through the “VIP lane”, of which 24, worth £1.7 billion, were referred by politicians from the Conservative party or their offices.
The UK government also awarded more than £30.7 billion in high-value contracts without competition – equivalent to almost two-thirds of all Covid contracts by value.
The Transparency International UK report, entitled Behind the Masks, acknowledged that there had been a need to act quickly as Covid took grip, but the authors claim there was an unjustifiable disregard for publishing the details of contracts and an unhealthy reliance in government on uncompetitive procurement even as the impact of the crisis on the health system subsided.
It estimates that Covid contracts boosted some suppliers’ profit margins by as much as 40 per cent, adding that some of the contracts they looked at displayed as many as eight red flags.
Daniel Bruce, the chief executive of Transparency International UK, said there had been a collapse in the normal checks and balances, and that a slew of changes in procurement was necessary to rebuild confidence in the system.
He said: “The scale of corruption risk in the former government’s approach to spending public money during the years of the Covid pandemic was profound.
“That we find multiple red flags in more than £15bn of contacts – amounting to a third of all such spending – points to more than coincidence or incompetence.
“The Covid procurement response was marked by various points of systemic weakness and political choices that allowed cronyism to thrive, all enabled by woefully inadequate public transparency. As far as we can ascertain, no other country used a system like the UK’s VIP lane in their Covid response.”
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