Speeches by Dixon.

“I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. She has spoken about some of the impacts of this issue. My 80-odd-year-old mum was recently admitted to Airedale hospital with acute respiratory issues. She had to wait in a chair for over 12 hours, alongside my dad, in a very undignified way. Does my hon. Friend agree t…”

“Will my hon. Friend give way?”

“I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend that it is not about fixing the problem at the front door; it is about fixing the problem at the back door. Does she agree that closer integration of health and social care is part of the answer to enable that flow through hospitals out into the community? During the summing up, I…”

“But that process did not include much due diligence at the beginning. Is that not correct?”

“Obviously, PPE was over-ordered and then sat in containers while so many did not get it. On a fundamental level, we are looking here mainly at waste, fraud and the waste of public money, but I want to recognise the human cost to some of those decisions.”

“If there were a similar emergency procurement needed—maybe not for PPE, but for drugs, vaccines or other things—would you be confident that you could deliver transparent procurement, there would be no need for a VIP lane, and conflicts of interest would be handled correctly? Given all the things that we saw go wrong in…”

“Given the failure to account for and deliver any PPE to social care at the outset, leaving care workers and the older and disabled people they were caring for very exposed to covid, with many tragic deaths of both care workers and people in their care, do your preparedness, modelling and robustness of distribution mech…”

“In terms of scope for further recovery from PPE contracts, obviously we know that PPE Medpro settled—£122 million—but there seem to be different views on the likelihood of you pursuing further claims and indeed on whether the legal costs of pursuing those further claims are worthwhile; can you comment on that?”

“Going back to how this all happened and preventing it—these are perhaps easier questions, as I know you were not around at that time—there seems to have been a combination of over-ordering, with wildly inaccurate modelling of the actual demand and the decision to order a 12-month stockpile at the height of it, and some…”

“You say that is on the contracting side; what about on the fraud side?”

“But you would suggest that there were some conflicts of interest?”

“My final point is really about the stuff that was never used. We have talked about how some contracts were not fulfilled. Obviously, some contracts were fulfilled, but the stuff was never used. It was put into storage containers. It was therefore very difficult to judge whether the stock supplied was substandard. Obvio…”

“The customer in this case was the NHS and the DHSC. We know that politicians were involved in putting companies on to the so-called VIP lane. At what point does the over-ordering and overpaying by a customer where there were relationships between politicians and some of the suppliers trigger things that you should be r…”

“I think we are doing a bit of a double act, Chair. Going back to PPE, this Committee has considered DHSC accounts over several years in which the large numbers you mentioned before—£10 billion—have been written down. That led to qualifications on those accounts by the Auditor General. You talked about the difference be…”

“I have a final question, and you can just give a short answer. Do you think that DHSC’s £324 million estimate of PPE fraud truly reflects taxpayers’ full loss from fraud? You can just say yes or no.”

“I commend the hon. Gentleman for speaking so clearly about why having an independent HSSIB—independent of those providers—to investigate is so important. Time and again, we hear about devastating failings in the NHS. He alludes to maternity services, but we could add to the list infected blood and pelvic mesh. Does he …”

“You mentioned the modelling being way out—sort of double plus a 20% contingency from any amounts that were ever used. It just mentions an external consultant; who did the modelling? Is that report in the public domain?”

“Given that my colleague, Catherine, did not ask you the question about how much you have already recovered and plan to recover, do you want to answer that now?”

“So there was literally nothing on paper that you could use to substantiate?”

“I will come on to PPE. Hello Samantha and Elizabeth. I do not know if you were able to hear our pre-panel. One of the questions that we put to the covid commissioner was around the 11 billion PPE items that were bought and never used by NHS and DHSC, as well as the estimated £324 million fraud estimate. He said it coul…”