Back in March 2021, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said in Parliament that details of all Covid contracts were now “on the record”. A month later, Cabinet Minister Julia Lopez, claimed “all historical covid-related contracts” had been published. However, an investigation by Good Law Project has found examples of 29 deals awarded where the contracts still haven’t been made public.
The Government is facing a judicial review challenge from the Good Law Project over a three-year delay in publishing the details of ventilator contracts worth £247m.
In a pre-action protocol letter sent to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the Minister for the Cabinet Office and the Secretary of State for Defence, the legal campaign group claim the Government’s failure to release the contracts amounts to a breach of Government policy on transparency.
The dispute centres around three sets of contracts awarded between May 2020 and January 2021 as part of the Government’s “ventilator challenge” programme, which called on manufacturers to step up the production of ventilators in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The first set of contracts highlighted in the claim were awarded to 14 manufacturers in May 2020 at a cost of £193m. A second batch of contracts awarded in August 2020 totalling £51m and a third contract totalling £3m are also targeted in the claim.
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