The Labour Party has criticised the Government’s failure to meet its own commitments to publish 100 outstanding Covid contracts during a Urgent Question in Parliament today.
In February, a High Court Ruling found the Government had acted unlawfully when it came to publishing contracts on time.
Later that month, the Prime Minister said: “the contracts are there on the record for everybody to see” but since then a Court Order, using the Government’s own figures, found that 100 contracts remain unpublished, leading to the Good Law Project to claim the Prime Minister appeared to have “misled” Parliament on the details.
Pressing the Government to publish those contracts in the public interest Rachel Reeves MP, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said the matter was urgent “because our frontline workers were not adequately protected with the high-quality PPE that they needed during this crisis,” and “because it is essential that taxpayers’ money is spent effectively and fairly not handed out to those who happen to have close links with the party of government.”
Reeves called on the Minister to apologise on behalf of government to set the record straight, and “to honestly tell our NHS nurses, now facing a pay cut, that the government has not wasted a single penny of their money on this curious incident of the missing contracts?”
