Billions Siphoned, Donors Rewarded, Democracy Sidelined: The Truth About Covid Cronyism
Russell Scott talks to Adrian Goldberg for the Byline Podcast about his explosive new book, 'VIP Lane: Cronyism and the Pandemic' that reveals what really happened during the UK's pandemic response
Russell Scott’s book, VIP Lane: Cronyism and the Pandemic, is out now published by Byline Books. He was also a key contributor to a brilliant documentary about the subject, The Covid Contracts: Follow the Money which is available now on ITVX.
The book tells the full inside story of how friends of Conservative ministers, peers and other high-ranking Tories were able to gain privileged access to Government contracts for the provision of urgently needed medical supplies, including personal protective equipment, PPE, as the coronavirus took hold.
Speaking the day before the High Court ordered the repayment of £122million by PPE MedPro, a company linked to Conservative peer Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman, which provided surgical gowns said to be unfit for use by the NHS, Russell Scott told Adrian Goldberg how he first got interested in the story.
“My first article on COVID-related issues was nothing to do with PPE. It was to do with pangolins, actually, an animal that was trafficked from Africa to China. And I did a piece on that for Greenpeace’s Unearthed Investigations team, because in the early days of the pandemic, there were concerns that animal trafficking had something to do with the spread of COVID.”
“As time went on, I started hearing of concerns around the way Government was placing contracts, in particular for PPE and ventilators. There were lots of concerns about companies with political connections getting contracts. So I started looking a little bit deeper.”
With frontline NHS staff on the news every day decrying their lack of PPE, images of nurses having to wear bin bags or buy ski goggles from Amazon, then go into hospital and fight this unknown disease, Russell Scott kept digging.
He found that contracts had been awarded to companies with no experience, or were brand new box fresh companies that had only just been set up, often with a director that was a donor to the Tory party or linked to a Tory MP or a minister or a peer within the Tory party.
In October 2020, the Good Law Project, where Russell Scott was then working, were leaked internal Government documents, “which spelled out in quite clear flow charts that there was a VIP lane set up where offers that came via an MP, politician, or a peer were quite clearly labelled to be fast-tracked and given priority treatment.”
Scott submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Government, asking who were those VIPs? How many companies were there? Who referred them? How did they get into this position?
The Government avoided answering the question for more than a year, but eventually The Good Law Project found that there were 50 companies on the VIP lane.
More than half of those were referred by people connected to the Tory party, and collectively, these VIP companies got contracts worth about four to five billion pounds, all without any sort of formal competition.
Half of these companies went on to provide PPE that was deemed unfit for the NHS.
It might be argued that in a time of crisis, stocks were in short supply already, and the Government had to accelerate the normal processes, but a lot of the companies provided PPE which was utterly useless, but still got paid tens of millions of pounds, in some cases hundreds of millions of pounds, by the taxpayer.
“There’s no doubt that we were, as a country, in a bad situation,” Russell Scott allows. “The pre-pandemic stockpile of PPE wasn’t really up to much. There was a lot of equipment there that was missing, a lot of equipment there that was out of date, a lot of equipment that was just literally falling to pieces. And what was any good, the distribution network in place to get these to the front line was just crumbling.”
He says that civil servants were under a lot of pressure to buy PPE and get it out the door as quickly as possible. But he also points out that no other country set up a VIP lane. “There’s no evidence of any other country setting up a procurement process that prioritised offers that came via politically connected companies. That just didn’t happen.”
No other country suspended normal procurement practices for as long as the UK did, he explains. Some for a matter of months, whereas we suspended the rules for a year. “And then on top of that, we spent £13 billion on just PPE, whereas other European countries, Germany, France, Italy, they spent the equivalent of £3 billion in total.”
The Government massively over-bought too. “Instead of buying something like four months worth of supply of PPE, we bought four to five years’ worth.” Which led to further costs. “At one point, we had 11,000 shipping containers just blocking Felixstowe Port. We were spending £1 million per day just to store this PPE.”
When much of it turned out to be useless, the chosen method of disposal was to incinerate it. “At the last count, we have incinerated one million pallets of PPE, that cost £8.6 billion to buy, literally up in smoke. And this is just unused PPE straight out of a shipping container, straight into the back of a lorry and straight to an incinerating plant.”
While Baroness Mone and Doug Barrowman have been in the spotlight, when it comes to the VIP lane, they were very much the norm, Scott says.
Just to give you a few other examples, there’s a company called Worldly Resources. Worldly Resources is based in Hong Kong. They hired a broker… who in turn teamed up with an ex-Tory MP... They then lobbied a number of ministers, Matt Hancock, Michael Gove, and then promptly found themselves on the VIP lane and were given something like a £200 million contract to provide goggles. Most of those goggles have, in fact, now been incinerated and were never used.”
Meanwhile, respected companies, like Arco, for example, the country’s biggest supplier of PPE to the NHS before the pandemic, which had provided PPE to deal with the Ebola crisis, were phoning every single day to try and sell PPE to the Government, but were ignored.
“Eventually, they managed to find a route around and go to the NHS direct, but what on earth is going on when VIP companies that have only just been set up with no experience are given billions of pounds yet the biggest supplier of PPE in the country is ignored?”
But there was also a second VIP Lane, for what was known as Test and Trace, which the National Audit Office has effectively said wasted £37 billion.
Russell Scott and the Good Law Project, working with the Guardian, discovered that during the period where COVID tests were being procured and the use of labs were being procured, 75% of contracts went to VIP lane suppliers.
“Just as a summary, the referral from six Tory politicians led to contracts worth over £5 billion being awarded.” Russell Scott says, singling out one particular company, which didn’t exist before 2020, whose tests had been rejected by the American FDA, were awarded contracts worth over £4 billion for COVID tests.
Scott’s investigations revealed that this company found its way onto the VIP lane after hiring British middlemen to lobby Dominic Cummings. In return, Dominic Cummings lobbied the Treasury. The tests, they supplied were only 60% accurate, but the company made huge sums of profit.
“I think the tests were 60% accurate, but as a palliative care nurse says in the documentary, 60%, I mean, what good is that to you?”
None of this money has yet been recouped, and all those involved deny any wrongdoing or that the VIP lane brought them any particular advantage. The Covid Inquiry grinds on.
But as Russell Scott reminds us, more than 220,000 of our fellow citizens and more than 800 NHS workers died during the pandemic:
“They literally, in many cases, went into bat against an unknown virus, you know, wearing bloody bin bags, because we couldn’t give them adequate PPE. And that can never be allowed to happen again.”
Listen to the whole interview on the Byline Podcast
Russell Scott’s book, VIP Lane: Cronyism and the Pandemic is published by Byline Books
The Covid Contracts: Follow the Money the documentary is available to watch on ITVX