This government is committed to paying properly, which is being addressed through the statutory National Living Wage. This is based on the recommendations of the Low Pay Commission. In April 2023, the National Living Wage increased to £10.42 per hour, an increase of 9.7%. By 2024, the Government has committed that the National Living Wage will reach 66% of median UK earnings.

Departments are responsible for setting the terms and conditions of employment for their civil servants, in accordance with the rules of the Civil Service Management Code. This includes matters related to sickness absence.

I was heartened earlier by the Secretary of State’s comments about resilience. As he knows, this is part of an international wake-up call, especially in the EU and the United States. Unfortunately, that was slightly undermined by the comments of his Minister, who was straight back to the old, tired dogma.

Does the Minister recognise that local and national Government have a crucial role as a customer for firms that need regular orders and work flow? When will our Government catch up with other countries all round the world and give priority to British industry, British agriculture and British workers?

The UK and its international partners stand shoulder to shoulder in implementing sanctions against malignant actors on the international stage. This includes the most severe sanctions ever against Russia, which represents over £18 billion in assets frozen and reported to the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation. Contracting authorities must comply with our sanctions, which have legal force.

On the question of procurement more widely, the British Chamber of Commerce found that, in 2021, small and medium-sized enterprises were receiving a relatively small amount of direct Government procurement money compared with five years ago. Can the Minister explain why SMEs are being increasingly sidelined from access to public procurement under his Government?

In November, it was revealed in The Guardian that the company Infosys was still operating in Russia, eight months after it announced that it would withdraw. Just a month later, that company was awarded a lucrative contract worth £1.7 million of taxpayers’ money. Was the Minister

aware of that when that contract was awarded, and do the Government believe that public money should be going to those who are operating in Russia?

What steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to ensure suppliers follow the UK’s sanctions regimes for public procurement.

Last year we established the Public Sector Fraud Authority as a centre of excellence to work with Departments and public bodies to understand and reduce the impact of fraud. It does so by providing expertise and best-in-class tools to prevent and detect fraud, including in contracts. The Procurement Bill will also fight fraud through extending the grounds for exclusion and by establishing a Department list.

What steps his Department is taking to tackle fraud in public sector contracts.

The covid pandemic exposed several conflict of interest problems in public sector procurement. The Government’s Procurement Bill is an excellent opportunity to address those, but it does not pick up all the issues raised by the Government’s own independent inquiries. What will the Minister do to improve on that?

The data for the Contracts Finder service and the Find a Tender Service is listed below.

Contracts Finder unique users by year, based on cookies which store user information and preferences between website visits. Starting in 2020, users were able to opt out of cookies, meaning that it became a much less reliable indicator of uniques users - and led to a drop in the reported number of unique users recorded using this methodology.

Contracts Finder service unique users by year:

2017 - 650,003

2018 - 656,661

2019 - 780,951

2020 - 533,809 - users begin to be able to opt out of cookies

2021 - 187,905

2022 - 169,530

Find a Tender Service unique users by year:

2021 - 90,503

2022 - 81,515

No assessment of business awareness is available. And, although user research is continually conducted with public and private sector users of both Contracts Finder and Find a Tender, no specific data is available with regards to user satisfaction. The ongoing user research is used to identify areas of improvement for both systems to meet ongoing user needs.

The data for the Contracts Finder service and the Find a Tender Service is listed below.

Contracts Finder unique users by year, based on cookies which store user information and preferences between website visits. Starting in 2020, users were able to opt out of cookies, meaning that it became a much less reliable indicator of uniques users - and led to a drop in the reported number of unique users recorded using this methodology.

Contracts Finder service unique users by year:

2017 - 650,003

2018 - 656,661

2019 - 780,951

2020 - 533,809 - users begin to be able to opt out of cookies

2021 - 187,905

2022 - 169,530

Find a Tender Service unique users by year:

2021 - 90,503

2022 - 81,515

No assessment of business awareness is available. And, although user research is continually conducted with public and private sector users of both Contracts Finder and Find a Tender, no specific data is available with regards to user satisfaction. The ongoing user research is used to identify areas of improvement for both systems to meet ongoing user needs.

The Government is committed to rooting out fraud and corruption in public procurement. All contracting authorities must act and be seen to act with integrity.

We have worked closely with the Serious Fraud Office, the Competition and Markets Authority and other experts to strengthen the rules around supplier exclusion through measures in the Procurement Bill and ensure that suppliers with a track record of fraud or corruption will be excluded from procurements, and cannot be awarded public contracts unless they can demonstrate that the circumstances giving rise to the fraud or corruption are not likely to occur again.

In addition, the Government has established the Public Sector Fraud Authority as part of a range of measures to tackle waste and inefficiency across the public sector. The Public Sector Fraud Authority is a new team at the heart of Government which works with departments and public bodies to understand and reduce the impact of fraud.

Party donors such as Clearsprings Ready Homes are making vast profits from the Home Office contracts for accommodation and food for asylum seekers. They are overseeing a murky network of subcontractors who are ripping off the hotels and caterers, and they are generating more than 200 complaints a month. What is the Cabinet Office doing now to ensure value for money and decent standards from those expensive Government contracts?

The driving principle behind public procurement policy is to award contracts on the basis of value for money, which means the optimum combination of cost and quality over the lifetime of the project.

The Government expects businesses to take all necessary steps to enable themselves to comply with their tax obligations, to ensure a fair and level playing field.

HM Revenue & Customs require certain large multinational enterprises to report details of their economic activities in each country where they operate and the taxes paid in each country. There are penalties for those that file late or fail to do so.

The Procurement Bill introduces new mandatory grounds for the exclusion of bidders which are found guilty of tax evasion or involvement in abusive tax avoidance schemes, whether in the UK or overseas.

UK public procurement policy is to award contracts on the basis of value for money, which means the optimum combination of cost and quality over the lifetime of the project. Public sector procurers are required to assess value for money from the perspective of the contracting authority, using criteria linked to the subject matter of the contract, including compliance with the published specification.

A Social Value model launched on 1 January 2021 (PPN 06/20), which is applicable to central Government departments, requires contracts to be assessed on a range of priority outcomes, where it is relevant and proportionate to do so, including improving accessibility to government contracts by a range of types of organisations, including minority ethnic owned businesses. This new approach will mean more opportunities for SMEs and social enterprises to win Government contracts by demonstrating the full extent of the value they would generate

As we look towards the future, we now have an opportunity to develop and implement a new procurement regime. The Procurement Bill contains proposals to further simplify the procurement process and make it easier for all companies to bid. The changes that are proposed are designed to benefit businesses of all sizes throughout the whole economy, including ethnic minority businesses; this includes measures that will reduce barriers to entry including establishing a single transparency platform so that bidders only have to submit their core credentials once, and making reforms to procurement frameworks so that suppliers are not locked out.

The driving principle behind public procurement policy is to award contracts on the basis of value for money, which means the optimum combination of cost and quality over the lifetime of the project, not just price alone. The best way to test for and to demonstrate this principle is via an open competition, as is required in most cases by public procurement legislation.

It is open to organisations to consider and bid for contract opportunities where appropriate. This Government is committed to ensuring procurement opportunities are accessible to a range of organisations, and in supporting start-ups, small businesses and Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprises to participate in government procurement.

This information is not held centrally.

The latest procurement figures for 2020/21 show that across central government, £19.3 billion, representing 26.9% of spending, was paid to small and medium sized businesses to help deliver public services. This figure is an increase of £3.7 billion on the previous year, and the highest since records began in 2013.

The Procurement Bill, currently being considered in the House of Lords, aims to make it simpler, quicker and cheaper for suppliers, including SMEs and social enterprises, to bid for public sector contracts.

The new rules focus more on delivering outcomes and will provide clearer rules overall and more flexibility for officials to use their commercial skills to achieve the desired outcomes.

In addition, the Commercial Playbooks include key policy reforms which help government and industry work better together to deliver quality public services and value for money.

‘Everything Net Zero’ is a framework, not a contract, which has been put together by the East of England Broadband Network, a regional consortium of local authorities and schools. It has not been put together by central government buyers. The framework is designed to help organisations, such as schools and local councils, find companies with whom they can work on sustainability projects, such as the installation of solar panels on schools.

The quoted £70 billion contract value is an estimate by the East of England Broadband Network of the highest possible maximum turnover the framework could generate over its lifetime. This is not money which has been awarded.

The Procurement Bill will enable simpler, more flexible procurement processes and increased transparency of planned procurements. These changes will make it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises to compete for and indeed win public contracts.