Michael Gove: this minister (who once got caught making a joke about rape on the radio, by the way) was in charge of handing out procurement contracts for PPE. At the time, This Site pointed out that they seemed to be going to his friends.
What does Michael Gove know about the contract under which Michelle Mone’s company won a PPE contract via the illegal VIP lane?
A leaked email has shown that he was involved…
Leaked email shows Gove was secretly involved in procuring £203m of govt PPE contracts for Michelle Mone's company via the VIP lane. Mone used private emails (against the rules) to contact procurement minister Lord Agnew, copying in Gove through his private Gmail account
… but look what happened when he was challenged about it!
Michael Gove left spluttering in the face of these straight forward questions: What do you remember about the PPE contract with Michelle Mone? What do you remember about the personal email she sent you?
Apparently this will be examined by the independent inquiry into Covid-19 this spring, and it has been suggested that Gove was trying hard not to say anything that may be used in evidence.
This could be highly informative!
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Uncannily accurate: The Conservative government’s genuine policy towards PIP claimants may as well have been as it appears in this cartoon from 2017. But what will replace the assessment system it satirises?
I should be pleased.
This Site has campaigned against the Work Capability Assessment for sickness and disability benefits, practically since I started publishing it at the end of 2011.
In my opinion, it has been misused, as a tool to force people who are too ill to work onto job-seeking benefits that carry sanctions if a claimant fails to carry out particular tasks – tasks which the long-term sick and disabled are often clearly incapable of doing.
In many cases, the results have been fatal. I know this because it took me two years to force the Department for Work and Pensions to release figures showing that 2,400 people died within a limited period (two weeks) after being found fit for work, between dates in 2011 and 2014.
That’s right – these people had been found fit to go to work by this hopelessly flawed tick-box assessment system, and then they had proven themselves to be nothing of the sort.
And the Tory government carried on as though nothing was wrong.
I also have personal experience of the system’s flaws. After my partner – Mrs Mike; remember her? – was wrongly put in the work-related activity group for Employment and Support Allowance, she appealed in the hope of being relocated to the support group.
Instead, whoever received her letter slapped a “Do Not Contact” tag on her file for no discernible reason and allowed her claim to end after 12 months, while she waited – in considerable confusion and distress – for a response that was never going to come.
Fortunately, I was around to kick up a stink and get the situation sorted out. But that just highlights the fact that many thousands of people don’t have that kind of help at hand.
And now, we’re told, the Work Capability Assessment is to be scrapped.
But we’re not being told what will replace it.
This Independent article has comments from a couple of organisations that have a stake in what happens:
Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Novak [said:] “Scrapping the work capability assessment will be welcome if it means an end to assessments that cause anxiety instead of helping people achieve their aspirations,” he added, while urging greater investment in public services to get people off NHS waiting lists and reduce barriers to training.
James Taylor of the disability equality charity Scope said axing the assessment was “the minimum change needed to even begin improving a welfare system that regularly fails disabled people”, and stressed the need for “a more person-centred system” offering “specialist, tailored and flexible” support.
“Those that want to work should be supported. But for some, that’s not an option and disabled people shouldn’t be forced into unsuitable work,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do for the government to restore trust in our benefits system.”
Notice that they both mentioned ways of getting more people back into work; this is Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s aim with the changes to the benefit system.
And that’s why I fear for the future of sickness and disability benefits in the UK.
I think the odious Hunt is planning another push to put sick people into jobs they can’t do. If I’m right, his plan will fail on many levels.
The problem with fighting the government to protect the vulnerable is that the government can keep attacking relentlessly.
Years ago, I ran a successful campaign that showed that thousands of people had died because the Department for Work and Pensions had denied them sickness benefits for no apparent reason.
It raised awareness that DWP decisions could be wrong and could be challenged, and I hope it saved a few lives.
Now, it seems the DWP has been quietly running a new scam – denying claims for the disability benefit Personal Independence Payment (PIP) by claiming to have lost the forms, or falsely recording that they have arrived after the deadline for returning them has passed:
Up to 42,000 claimants had their Personal Independence Payment (PIP) award stopped in 2021, an increase of almost 300% in just two years. 25,400 claims were disallowed in 2020. The figures were revealed by Tom Pursglove, DWP minister for disabled people, in response to a written parliamentary question.
The figures refer to people who allegedly failed to return their AR1 PIP review form but it is not known whether non-return includes forms that were returned late. It is also not clear how many people challenged the decision that they had failed to return their form on time.
Mr Pursglove’s response shows that the number of claims disallowed each year for non-return of the AR1 review form have increased steadily year on year since 2017, when there were 7,500 claims disallowed.
The DWP has come out with its usual flannel about helping millions of people every year – as though that is some kind of huge achievement and not its job.
It says only a small proportion of claimants are penalised for non-return of forms, as though 67,400 people in two years is a small number and not more people than live in entire towns the size of Taunton or Hereford.
I tend to agree with the website Benefits and Work, which has stated:
The number of claimants allegedly failing to return their forms seems to be far outstripping any rises in awards that had taken place at the time. We know that the DWP’s post handling and call management is dire and getting ever worse. It seems very possible that many disallowed claimants are returning their forms on time, but the DWP is either losing them or taking far too long before recording that they have been received.
“We have no way of knowing how many of the 42,000 claimants appealed or how many simply gave up in despair, even though they knew they had returned their form on time. Other claimants may have failed to return the review form because of the effects of a physical or mental health condition.”
The DWP reckons it ‘watermarks’ files on claimants with serious mental health or cognitive conditions who have difficulty communicating or engaging with the process as Additional Support (AS) – meaning they will be asked to attend a PIP assessment even if they fail to return their form.
And claimants who are identified or deemed as vulnerable – due to their circumstances, not just their condition – are watermarked ‘Additional Customer Support (ACS)’.
But I can’t help remember how Mrs Mike was ‘watermarked’ when she appealed against a decision to put her in the work-related activity group for Employment and Support Allowance. Her file was marked ‘Do Not Contact’, and we knew nothing about it until we were notified that her year on the benefit had expired and she was no longer entitled to it.
As is well-documented in previous articles on this site, I went through the roof and the government department backtracked rapidly. Mrs Mike is now in the support group, where she belongs.
So I have doubts about DWP ‘watermarking’ claims.
As far as lost or delayed forms are concerned, I recommend that anybody claiming benefits from the DWP make a copy of any forms they send, and post the forms using a system that requires a DWP representative to sign for them. This evidence can then be copied from the Royal Mail and used to show exactly when the DWP receives the forms.
Alternatively, if the DWP doesn’t receive the forms, claimants can get in touch, say their forms have been lost by the Royal Mail, and request a new set of forms and an extension to their deadline. The forms can then be duplicated, using the copies of the original that have already been made.
Does that seem fair? Does anybody with experience of the current system have any other ideas?
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Well, we know about the money (allegedly) connected to Michelle Mone, along with sundry others.
But that still leaves billions of pounds of lost cash that needs to be fully explained. Doesn’t it?
Read:
The Department of Health and Social Care’s annual accounts for 2021-22 have revealed a further £6 billion write down in connection with PPE and other inventory. This follows a staggering £8.9bn write down in 2020-21.
The total – almost £14.9bn – exceeds by almost £2bn the aggregate sum spent on PPE. The National Audit Office reported in March 2022 that “DHSC has so far spent £12.6bn of the total £13.1bn it expects to spend on almost 38 billion items of PPE.”
The further write down is made up of:
£2.5 billion write-down of items procured in 2021-22 which relates to items the Department no longer expects to use or due to falling market prices;
£3.5 billion for onerous costs relating to PPE, vaccines and medicines for items it had agreed to purchase before 31 March 2022, but which it now does not expect to use.
The annual accounts also reveal that storage costs were running at approximately £24m per month. Good Law Project has previously revealed that PPE storage costs exceed £1bn in total and hundreds of millions of pounds were going to Uniserve, a ‘VIP’ that had also supplied substantial quantities of PPE.
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An investigation by Good Law Project has uncovered the huge profits made by Zoe Ley after she brokered a £250m PPE deal for Hong Kong-based Worldlink Resources – a firm who landed two huge contracts via the unlawful ‘VIP’ lane.
Ley, a former dog food vendor, incorporated a new company called ‘Life Partners Ltd’ at the start of the pandemic to broker PPE supplies. Documents published on Companies House reveal that Ley’s company made an eye-watering £17.6m net profit in its first year of trading.
We previously revealed that Worldlink Resources won their mammoth PPE contracts after being referred onto the VIP lane by former Cabinet Minister, Lord Agnew. The firm won two contracts: a £178M deal to supply goggles awarded in June 2020 and a £80m contract, awarded in May 2020 to supply surgical gowns
Furthermore, documents obtained by Good Law Project uncovered serious questions about the usefulness of the PPE provided. Tens of millions of the goggles procured under the £178m deal could end up going to waste.
Zoe Ley partnered with former Conservative Party MP, Brooks Newmark, to lobby Matt Hancock and other ministers on behalf of Worldlink resources.
Newmark’s consultancy business which was dormant in the four years before the pandemic has seen a big change of fortune. Capital and reserves at ‘Brooks Newmark & Co’ have jumped from minus £2,318 up to £2.3m in 2021.
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She may have run away from public life but she can’t run away from the evidence.
Led By Donkeys, the campaign group that posts billboards contrasting politicians’ current stated opinions with those they have promoted in the past in order to call out hypocrisy, has created a new short film that you should watch.
It’s about Michelle Mone, her connection with the company PPE Medpro, and the way she was apparently paid £29 million for inducing the Tory government, during the Covid crisis, to buy millions of pieces of personal protective equipment that was unfit to be used.
The information is highly revealing, as you can see for yourself:
The doctor presenting the video would be perfectly justified to be angry about this because – as she states in the clip – the waste of money meant it could not be spent on acceptable PPE that would have been used to protect NHS staff and Covid-suffering patients.
There is a high possibility that – because of the apparent avarice of Lady Mone and her associates, and the inadequacy of Michael Gove and the Tory “VIP lane” system of allocating contracts to friends of the Conservatives – many thousands of people died.
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This is about the corrupt awarding of contracts to firms that did not supply adequate materials (in this case, Personal Protective Equipment to help with the Covid-19 crisis).
Phil Moorhouse of A Different Bias lays out the situation as it stood at midday on December 7:
Keir Starmer interrogated Rishi Sunak about this in Prime Minister’s Questions – and Sunak was pilloried for his response. Note that he confirmed that Mone “no longer has the Conservative whip”:
The sideswipe from Sunak, that Labour should “stand up for working people” – by opposing industrial action by working people who are struggling to survive in an atmosphere of real-terms pay cuts while inflation spirals out-of-control – is perverse.
It’s shameful that the UK has been reduced to having a prime minister who can’t respond naturally to questions but has to read his answers from a piece of paper.
Who’s telling him what to say about this scandal?
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Leave of absence: Lady Mone. Apparently she doesn’t turn up to the House of Lords very often and rarely votes. One is led to wonder what she considers her peerage to be for.
Tory Baroness Michelle Mone, currently at the centre of a scandal over a £29 million payout by a firm said to have provided duff PPE to the government during the Covid-19 crisis, has taken a leave of absence from the House of Lords.
Watch this article on YouTube:
Mone says she has been unjustly accused of taking £29 million from a Personal Protective Equipment manufacturer in thanks for her recommending its products in the “VIP lane” for firms fast-tracked by politicians or officials.
Not only has the “VIP lane” since been branded illegal, but it has been claimed that much of the gear from PPE Medpro didn’t meet the standard.
She says she is leaving to clear her name. Her choice coincides with efforts by the Labour Party to force the publication of texts and emails relating to £200m of Covid PPE contracts secured by PPE MedPro, a company linked to the Tory peer.
And it follows accusations from former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who said had sent him an “aggressive and threatening” email in June 2021, demanding his “urgent help” to secure a government contract for a firm that he did not name.
In his book Pandemic Diaries, which is currently being serialised by a newspaper, he wrote: ”
Baroness Michelle Mone has sent me an extraordinarily aggressive email complaining that a company she’s helping isn’t getting the multi-million-pound contracts it deserves.
She claims the firm, which makes lateral flow test kits, ‘has had a dreadful time’ trying to cut through red tape and demanded my ‘urgent help’ before it all comes out in the media.
‘I am going to blow this all wide open,’ she threatened.
I won’t be pushed around by aggressive peers representing commercial clients.
That’s pretty damning stuff!
Hancock has claimed that Mone was actively and aggressively trying to secure contracts for “commercial clients” – which implies a business relationship, so he believed Mone was being (or would be) paid by this firm for her efforts to win contracts for it.
That is precisely what the accusation against her entails and I hope he provides any evidence he has to any investigation.
And Mone has taken a leave of absence at this time. I wonder if she’ll ever come back.
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Just at the moment, there’s a very low bar to limbo under – but it seems former Ultimo underwear boss turned Tory peer Michelle Mone may have managed it.
The allegation in The Guardian is that, while the rest of us laboured under lockdown, desperate to keep ourselves and our relatives alive, Lady Mone was making £65 million from a Personal Protective Equipment manufacturer in thanks for her recommending its products in the “VIP lane” for firms fast-tracked by politicians or officials.
Not only has the “VIP lane” since been branded illegal, but it has been claimed that much of the gear from PPE Medpro didn’t meet the standard.
It was suggested that…
Michelle Mone, a Tory peer, her husband, Douglas Barrowman, and her children secretly received £65m originating from the profits of PPE Medpro, a company that was awarded large government contracts during the pandemic after she recommended it to ministers.
The government lubricated such questionable deal-making by setting up a “VIP lane” into which suppliers recommended by politicians or officials were fast-tracked.
PPE Medpro’s business was referred to the VIP lane after Lady Mone contacted the ministers Michael Gove and Lord Agnew to offer help in May 2020. A few weeks later, the government contracted to pay the firm £203m for protective equipment for the NHS.
A court later said that the VIP lane was unlawful. Perhaps worse, it was ineffective. The government is now in dispute over millions of surgical gowns supplied by PPE Medpro that it says were not up to scratch. PPE Medpro insists its products passed inspections.
Lady Mone… denies becoming fantastically rich by profiting from a company she lobbied to be awarded state contracts.
But she is also
being investigated by the Lords commissioner for standards after being accused of failing to declare an interest in PPE Medpro.
The Guardian, outraged, claims that peerages should not be a means to personal or ideological ends.
But isn’t that the best that can be said of almost any UK politician these days?
They all seem to be on the take and for many, it seems, that is the only point of being in Westminster at all.
It isn’t many years since it was possible to discuss genuine political theory when examining politicians’ behaviour – but now all we see is avarice.
Too many have been caught lobbying for the firms that gave them their second or third job, or using their position to rig the rules in their own fields of business, or seen to have set themselves up for high-paid jobs after leaving Parliament. Haven’t they?
Sadly, we don’t have a way of looking into candidates’ minds before they get elected into their Commons seats, to detect the corruption before it can do its worst.
So, what is the solution to the rot that’s making Parliament reek?
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This image never gets tired: the kind of “PPE” initially used by UK NHS staff is shown at bottom right.
Do you think it’s an accident that the Tory government is planning to destroy billions of pounds worth of Personal Protective Equipment it bought during the Covid-19 crisis, that proved to be unusable?
Of £12 billion the Department of Health (DoH – perhaps to be pronounced “D’oh!” in resemblance of Homer Simpson’s catchprhase whenever he does something idiotic) spent on PPE during the crisis, £8.7 billion had to be written off, including £4 billion because the equipment, including masks and gowns, did not meet NHS standards, was defective or not needed.
This was the time of Matt Hancock’s “VIP lane” procurement system that prioritised Tory friends and donors with no experience of providing medical equipment over firms of seasoned professionals. 24 per cent of the PPE contracts awarded are now in dispute.
Not only that but, in defiance of the government’s own pandemic plan, Boris Johnson had allowed supplies of protective equipment to dwindle before the pandemic struck. It was supposed to be possible to replenish them with “just in time” supplier contracts, but Johnson waited until too late to call them in; the (mostly Chinese) suppliers were already swamped by demand from their own health service and elsewhere.
Worse, he actually sent 1,800 pairs of goggles and 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks – 278,800 items in total – to China, five days before NHS chiefs warned a lack of PPE left the health service facing a “nightmare”.
And now the DoH is planning to burn public money – literally – by incinerating the unusable equipment in order to generate power. It has not explained what the environmental impact of this plan will be.
Doesn’t it seem that the Tories are trying to destroy the evidence of their Covid-19 PPE mismanagement, before an inquiry into it is launched?
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