30: Clause 8, page 6, line 28, at end insert “and which are health or social care services supplied for benefit of individuals”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment probes why light touch contracts are not more narrowly defined in Clause 8.
My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendment 207 in my name. My noble friend Lord Lansley has Amendment 35 in this group but is unable to be with us in Committee this week. At his request, with the leave of the Committee, I shall be speaking to his amendments on both Committee days this week.
At Second Reading, I noted that the definition of light-touch contracts is extremely wide since it concerns the supply of services of any kind, provided that they have been specified by regulations under Clause 8(2). It is my understanding that light-touch contracts are currently for health and social care services—indeed, that is implied by the reference to those services in Clause 8(4)(b). The wide scope given by the lack of restriction in Clause 8(2) means that, notwithstanding the “have regards” in Clause 8(4), it would be possible, for example, for the Government to specify legal services, accountancy services or any other kind of services. The “have regards” are simply not an effective curtailment of the very wide power in Clause 8(2).
My Amendment 30 seeks to confine light-touch contracts to health or social care services provided to individuals, on the basis that, it is my understanding, that is how they are used at the moment. However, if the Government believe that there should be a wider concept than that, they should put that in the Bill. Open-ended regulation-making powers should not be necessary and are not desirable.
My noble friend Lord Lansley’s Amendment 35 would add another “have regard” to Clause 8(4): whether suppliers of light-touch services consist of small and medium-sized enterprises and few larger enterprises. The other three “have regards” seem to be designed to reflect the current scope of light-touch contracts: they do not generally involve overseas suppliers, they are generally for the benefit of individuals and they involve suppliers that are close to service recipients. Another feature of current service provision is the presence of small and medium-sized service providers in both the private sector and the voluntary sector.
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 30 but just want to say that I agree with Amendment 33, in which my noble friend Lord Wallace asks why suppliers from outside the UK are likely to want to compete for contracts for the supply of services. Amendments 34 and 35 remind us that there are a wide range of different bodies that need to be able to tender for services, probably mainly local, but they should not be either excluded formally or informally as a result of this Bill.
Returning to Amendment 30, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for her helpful introduction and I want to raise with the Minister matters that we will be returning to in Clauses 41 and 108. As the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has laid an amendment that includes health and social care services supplied for the benefit of individuals, there are questions that need to be raised. Had we been debating the second group of government amendments today, I would have covered this topic in the Minister’s Amendment 526 as well.
Clause 108 sets out the disapplication for this Bill in relation to procurement by NHS England, but Section 79 of the Health and Care Act talks about
“health care services for the purposes of the health service in England, and … other goods or services that are procured together with those health care services.”
It goes on to define a relevant authority in healthcare services in subsection (7) as
“(a) a combined authority;
(b) an integrated care board;
(c) a local authority in England;
(d) NHS England;
(e) an NHS foundation trust;
(f) an NHS trust established under section 25”.
The problem is that that definition excludes certain parts of health services. For example, an integrated care board will be commissioning, but not procuring directly, some services to primary and secondary care organisations. However, not all NHS organisations are covered by the relevant authority in the healthcare definition. For example, a GP surgery might be a private partnership or a company employing surgery staff including GPs. This might be UK based or even an overseas company, but not a trust or any of the other definitions. The same definition also exists for dentists’ surgeries. I was wondering if the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, was thinking that this type of organisation would be covered by her amendment. Most of them are small organisations.
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 33 and 34, but I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Brinton for highlighting the need to make sure that this Bill and the Health and Care Act do not contradict each other. I was struck by a speech by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, at the Second Reading of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill the other week, in which he suggested that the Minister consider whether definitions of freedom of speech in the Online Safety Bill and the higher education Bill were compatible. The noble Lord very much doubted that they were. In spite of the current chaos within the Government, they need to ensure that different Bills going through in the same Session are compatible and do no cut across each other.
Amendments 33 and 34 are concerned with light-touch contracts. Amendment 33 is purely a probing amendment. We wish to understand the circumstances in which suppliers from outside the UK are likely to want to compete for contracts of the sort that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, suggested would be covered under the light-touch system—primarily, the provision of personal and social services to be delivered on the ground, in local communities, by people with sufficient local knowledge to be effective.
My concern here was heightened by the outsourcing of the initial test and trace contracts to two large companies, one of which has its headquarters in Miami, Florida, and neither of which has any appropriate expertise in local delivery or geography. Not surprisingly, therefore, testing stations were set up in inconvenient places and local volunteers, who offered to assist in large numbers, were often ignored. My colleague, my noble friend Lord Purvis, would have wished to ask whether the new trade agreements the DIT is negotiating would nevertheless open these contracts to overseas companies, including those from non-English speaking countries. Can the Minister therefore explain and justify the paragraph concerned?
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I speak from direct experience of the higher quality of charity-run care homes and the greater dedication and commitment of their staff. We all know of effective social care provision by mutuals, social enterprises and charities under contract to government. This amendment emphasises that there is and should be a significant role for this sector alongside profit-making outsourcing companies and government agencies, particularly in this sensitive area of personal social public services. We support a mixed economy in the provision of public services, not an overwhelming dependence on large outsourcing contractors regardless of the type of service provided. I hope the Minister does too, and that she will recognise that the Bill, in its current position as a skeleton Bill, needs to have more of the principles set out in it.
My Lords, I rise to make my first contribution in this Committee, so I declare my position as vice-president of the Local Government Association. I must also, slightly belatedly, thank the Bill team for last Wednesday morning’s briefing, which was very helpful in trying to come to grips with the complexity of the Bill. There are many people with a great deal more experience than me who are also wrestling with the complexity.
I rise to speak chiefly to Amendment 34 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who has just very ably introduced it. I also support Amendment 33. As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, was speaking, I was thinking of the case study of the Dutch firm Randstad and the disaster of the Covid tutoring. That was a very large and important contract that I think the Government would now acknowledge went horribly wrong and should clearly never have been let overseas in the first place. The noble Lord also referred to care homes. Financialisation and hedge fund or overseas ownership of care homes is something I have been very concerned about since a brilliant report, which is highly relevant, from the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change in 2016. It put that issue on the agenda and it has been focused on since by, for example, the Financial Times.
On Amendment 34, I perhaps come at this from a slightly different philosophical position from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in that I would like to get rid of all financialised provision and see it all in non-profit hands. I believe that is what is appropriate for this. This amendment is probing to ensure that organisations such as local social enterprises, not-for-profit companies and charities are able to apply for contracts. I would like to go stronger on that. I would like to see a preference for those organisations having many of these contracts. I think I am going to anonymise this case study because I have not had the chance to check with the people concerned, but a number of years ago I knew an excellent local rape crisis service that had been providing provision in a city for a number of years. Eventually I found out a month or so after a new contract was supposed to have started that it had been handed to a large national organisation. It was a total mess.
My Lords, good afternoon. When the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, leads a group of amendments, I often end up agreeing with her; it is a bit of a surprise sometimes. Amendment 30, which the noble Baroness has moved, goes to the heart of it, as do all the amendments, because of the lack of clarity about what Clause 8 really means and what is meant by light-touch contracts. It is a really important job of this Committee to try to tease out a little bit more detail.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, probes in her amendment, why are they not more narrowly defined? There is also an argument for asking why they are not more widely defined. I think the noble Baroness—she will no doubt correct me if I am wrong—is seeking to understand the Government’s thinking and how they have arrived at their conclusions. I think that is what all the various amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and so on, are about.
In speaking to these amendments, I too am seeking clarity from the Government on what this clause means. I will start with the most obvious point. I have read the Library briefing, which refers to the Government’s own memorandum to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee on light-touch contracts, and will quote a couple of things that I think are relevant to all the amendments in this group, including lead Amendment 30 from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes:
“The light touch regime is a facet of the existing rules … and has fewer rules regulating how a procurement is conducted for these contracts. This is reflected in the bill by a series of exceptions of obligations under the procurement regime for the relevant contracts.”
I will be frank: what does that actually mean? Which rules are not applied? There was one set of rules before, under the light-touch regime, which at one point the Government were not going to include in the Bill. That then moved to light-touch contracts, but we are told by the Government that there are fewer rules.
My Lords, I will start with a question from the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. I will probably not answer it in a way he understands, but I will give it a go and we will probably have more discussions on this as we go forwards.
The services currently identified via these CPV codes, as the noble Lord talked about, are outside the scope of the GPA, albeit within scope of some national treatment provisions in certain international agreements. As such, these could arguably be subject to even less regulation, but we think we have the balance right to ensure competition where possible, value for money, and appropriate transparency and fairness. That is the background to this. The Green Paper proposed removing the separate light-touch provision entirely, but it was clear that this was a popular concept, recognising that these types of services warrant special treatment with a light touch. If they were subject to the full regime, we would be adopting a more stringent approach than that taken by any other European country. That is why we have put them in, and we think that is correct. I am sure we will have more discussions on that.
Before we turn to the amendments, because they were slightly separate, I will answer the questions of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, on how this Bill interacts with the Health and Care Act. At Second Reading, concern was raised regarding the interaction between the Health and Care Act 2022 and the Procurement Bill. I hope that my noble friend’s letter of 8 June allays these concerns. To confirm, the intention is that the provisions in the Procurement Bill will be disapplied for a tightly defined subset of healthcare services that will instead fall within the provider selection regime. The provider selection regime has bespoke rules which commissioners of healthcare services in the NHS and local government will follow when procuring healthcare services in their area, and only where delivered directly to patients and service users.
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We recognise the need for the integration of healthcare commissioning across local authorities and the NHS. DHSC and Cabinet Office are working together to ensure that the two regimes remain clear and coherent. This includes healthcare or health-adjacent services that are not delivered to patients but help support the infrastructure of the NHS and, as such, are outside of the scope of the PSR. It also includes all services when procured by authorities other than NHS bodies and local authorities. I hope that makes it clearer for the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. We understand this and are working to make sure that the two regimes work together.
I turn now to the amendments in this group, beginning with government Amendment 32 in the name of my noble friend the Minister. This is put forward simply to insert “appropriate” before “authority”, to make it clear that the body taking into account the matters in Clause 8(4) is the appropriate authority—that is, the body making the regulations under Clause 8(2) and not any other type of authority.
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If the supplier market features large suppliers, including overseas ones, there really is no good policy reason for the light-touch regime to be applied; the full-fat version of the procurement rules should be in place for them. A light-touch contract should not become a convenient escape from the procurement regime for contracting authorities. They should be focused on the supplier end of the market, where a lighter regime would be appropriate.
Amendment 207 is rather different. It tries to tease out the Government’s intentions for contracts under Clause 33, which covers the reservation of certain light-touch contracts to public sector mutuals. A qualifying public sector mutual is one that has not been awarded a contract in the previous three years, under Clause 33(5). So if I am a public sector mutual and I am awarded a contract on 1 January 2022, that means that I may be excluded from tenders under subsection (2) for the three years until 31 December 2024, and under subsection (3) a contracting authority must exclude me from tenders assessed under Clause 18 until the same date—that is, the end of 2024.
If my earlier contract is for five years, which is the maximum allowed under Clause 33(1), I think that I would not be excludable from retendering when the contract came up for renewal, because the retendering process would almost certainly have started after the end of December 2024. If, however, my initial contract was for three years, I would almost inevitably be excluded from bidding for its renewal because the retendering process would by definition have to start before the end of December 2024.
My amendment proposes changing the period in subsection (5) from three years to five, but that is for probing purposes. I do not understand whether the Government are trying to allow or prohibit public sector mutuals from carrying out consecutive contracts, if indeed they were awarded them under a competition. It seems bizarre that a shorter contract could prohibit the public sector mutual from retendering while a long one would not.
In addition, I am less than clear on how contract award and commencement dates are supposed to interact, given that a contract could be awarded some considerable time before it is intended to commence. I know that my noble friend the Minister has Amendment 206 to Clause 33, which is not in this group and would slightly alter its wording, but I do not think that that will answer the basic question that I have posed. I beg to move.
I ask the Minister this question of principle, really as advance warning that we will return to it later in the Bill. Why are health services, clinical and
“other goods or services that are procured together with those health care services”,
going to have a completely different procurement regime entirely delegated to the relevant Secretary of State, who can enact it by SI? That can ignore all the important clauses that we are debating in this Bill—value for money, value for society, transparency and the technical elements critical for anybody wishing to procure goods and services using money from the public purse, except for those parts of the health service that do not fall into that definition in the Health and Care Act, which will have to abide by the Procurement Bill.
Secondly, can the Minister advise on exactly where the dividing line is for those parts of the health service that are commissioned by other parts of it, but do not fall under the definition? It would be perfectly logical to have a contractor team preparing a bid for a contract with a regional consortium that includes a hospital trust and a non-NHS body, perhaps a charity—exactly the sort of small organisation that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, referred to—that worked with patients. It would have to remember, if syringes were included in that PFI contract for the new wing, for example, when the NHS procurement system would therefore be used, that there would be an entirely different set of rules, processes, et cetera, compared with a contract for a hospital trust that covered only non-clinical items, and therefore used the terms in this Bill.
This will be horribly messy. It will not just be confusing for contractors, which will need teams fully au fait with where the dividing line is between the completely different rules that will apply, but I suspect it will be total chaos inside the NHS. Can the Minister explain the thinking behind this and where the differences are? If possible, could we have a meeting with him and other noble Lords interested in the interface between this Bill and the Health and Care Act legislation, and in how it will work in practice?
Amendment 34 would put in the Bill the importance of local provision of services and the constructive role that non-profit entities can play in the provision of services in which sympathy, personal relationships and concern for welfare above immediate profit are important parts of the motivation for those who work in them and in which volunteers can also contribute to effective supply. My experience here is mainly from the care home sector, although I believe the argument stretches a good deal more widely than that. Private companies, including offshore-based private equity companies, have made excessive profits out of care home provision in a number of cases. Noble Lords will be familiar with Terra Firma, which the Minister will recall is based in the Channel Islands. That is why I have a later amendment that challenges the question of whether companies based in the Crown dependencies and overseas territories should be considered UK suppliers—but there are other examples.
We have seen far too many cases like that where excellent local provision, which may not be expert at putting in tender documents but is expert at providing services, is swept aside under our current arrangements. I mentioned the Financial Times. There is very general agreement across the political spectrum that we need to stop that happening and ensure that good local services and social enterprises are able to continue, have stability, surety and certainty and do not need to put so much of their resources into the endless cycle of bidding and bidding again. I am not sure whether this amendment exactly gets to where I want to go, but it is certainly heading in the right direction. That is why I wished to speak in favour of it.
It would be helpful to know what the difference is. What are the fewer rules which the Government have explained to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee? The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made the point that what we are all struggling with is that Clause 8(1) says what “light touch contract” means and then that it will all be done by regulation. In fact, it is a bit like knitting fog to try to understand exactly where we are coming to and what we are doing.
The Government also said in their memorandum to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which, again, is relevant to all these amendments:
“Whilst the scope of what is to be included in the power is known, it is not practicable for the bill to include a long list of detailed CPV codes to indicate which categories of contracts may benefit from the light touch regime. In addition, both CPC and CPV codes may evolve over time, which would … require amendment to the bill. The power will be used to ensure that the scope of what is included with the light touch regime does not extend beyond what is permitted for the UK by reference to the GPA and/or other international trade agreements.”
Again, we are trying to understand what that really means for the light-touch regime which the Government are seeking to bring in as a result of Clause 8 and associated regulations. Some clarity on that would help to answer the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, about why it is not more narrowly defined and why it is defined in the way it is. That would help us to understand the Government’s thinking behind much of the clause.
The amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, gets to the heart of what we are discussing: how the Government have arrived at their position. However, in particular, Amendment 34 from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, raises a very important point about ensuring that light-touch contracts will involve various other services and bodies and that they are properly considered for such contracts.
Time and again, at the heart of previous groups, this group, and no doubt groups of amendments to come is a general debate on what a Procurement Bill should or should not include and how far the Government should or should not interfere with the operation of the market. What the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, is trying to get at, and what I believe is really important, is some of the ways in which this clause has been put together, so that we understand what exactly a light-touch contract is and the difference between the light-touch regime and the light-touch contracts in this Bill, and the Government’s thinking on what regulations may come forward in due course so that, as a Committee, we can consider whether they have got the balance right and whether this makes sense. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made the point that this clause is wishy-washy—one bit says this and another says that—and the Government’s get-out clause all the time is that it will be sorted out by regulation. This really is not the way forward for primary legislation.
The scope of the provider selection regime will be supported by reference to the common procurement vocabulary—CPV—codes, which will help procurement personnel to determine which regime applies. As the provider selection regime will sit alongside the reforms introduced by the Procurement Bill, DHSC and the Cabinet Office are working together to ensure that the two regimes remain clear and coherent. The Procurement Bill, and therefore the light-touch contract provisions, will continue to apply to healthcare or health-adjacent services that are not delivered to patients but support the infrastructure of the NHS. Light-touch contracts will also continue to include all services procured by authorities other than NHS bodies and local authorities. I hope that helps.
There was another question from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about how the PSR interacts with the new reforms in the Procurement Bill. The PSR will cover the procurement of healthcare services that are delivered to patients and service users, as I have said, and only when they are arranged by relevant healthcare authorities, including NHS bodies and local authorities. The Procurement Bill will not apply to these but will cover all other goods and services.