Recommendation 9

Our report on Government’s procurement and supply of personal protective equipment during the pandemic found that a failure to be transparent had opened up Government to accusations of poor value for money, conflicts of interest and preferential treatment of some suppliers, and risked undermining public trust in government procurement and the use of taxpayers’ money.21 BEIS recognised that the involvement of a range of different people being brought in to support government’s decisions created the potential for conflicts of interest. BEIS and the Taskforce share a register of conflicts of interest between their HR Department and Programme Management Office each week. By December 2020, 38 individuals within the Taskforce had registered at least one conflict of interest.22 We asked the Departments how they were ensuring that conflicts of interest were properly managed. Both the Department and BEIS explained that their approach 14 Qq 99, 112, C&AG’s Report, para 2, 1.1, 3.1–3.2 15 Qq 99–100, 116–117 16 Qq 101–102, C&AG’s Report para 3.1–3.5 17 Qq 109–110, C&AG’s Report, para 3.11 18 Qq 110–114, 118–121 19 Q 109 20 Qq 110–111, 117 21 Committee of Public Accounts, COVID-19: Government procurement and supply of personal protective equipment, HC 928, 10 February 2021 22 Q 106, C&AG’s Report, para 3.7 12 COVID-19: Planning for a vaccine Part 1 was the same as for any other area of their work and that they had standard procedures in place to deal with conflicts of interest.23 BEIS told us that the majority of the conflicts of interests within the Taskforce were attributable to members of staff who had been brought in from the private sector, but that in most cases the potential conflicts of interest were small. It explained that it had needed to scale up its business-as-usual conflicts of interest system to deal with the quantity of people coming in, but that this was “not particularly because they have been more conflicted that usual, but because there have been more of the