News In Brief: Undisclosed Insights from the Corridors of Power – Randox and Turing

NEWS IN BRIEFUndisclosed Insights from the Corridors of Power: Randox and Turing

Sam Bright pens his most interesting findings after delving into a range of recent written parliamentary questions

The mission of Byline Times is to tell our readers what the papers don’t say: illuminating the issues that other outlets – beholden to billionaire proprietors and compromised by their closeness to power – are neglecting.

In particular, the media is fixated on the political horse-race – endlessly speculating on the game of politics, rather than its real impact on policies and lives.

Thus, in this regular ‘News In Brief’ column, Byline Times will be exploring the stories that have slipped between the cracks – the droplets of information that illuminate the workings of the Government and its agenda, derived from the correspondence between MPs and ministers.

WINTER SOLDIERS

As of 7 January, there were 1,792 armed forces personnel deployed to alleviate domestic winter pressures – such as assisting the NHS, including but not limited to administering COVID-19 vaccines. Of the 939 personnel deployed in support of the COVID-19 vaccination programme, 66% had received a booster jab by this date.

As Byline Times has previously revealed, more than 130 military personnel were still being asked to deliver fuel to petrol stations as of mid-December. According to the Government, the UK’s defence operation has supported more than 430 tasks in response to the Coronavirus pandemic.

TURING TENDER

The Government has confirmed that the outsourcing giant Capita put in the lowest bid to run the UK’s post-Brexit international exchange programme, the Turing Scheme.

Capita was one of only two companies to submit a “compliant bid”, to the value of £6.3 million.

The Government said that Capita’s bid “was considered to be the highest in quality” – although critics have rebuked the fact that the British Council was not awarded the contract, given that it administered the predecessor to the Turing Scheme, the EU’s Erasmus programme.

In contrast to Capita, the British Council is an independent public body.

WASTED VACCINES

The Government has refused to say how many vaccine doses in England were disposed of in each of the past six months after passing their expiry date.

Labour’s Shadow Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting asked this question of the Government on 11 January, to which Vaccines Minister Maggie Throup replied: “The information is not available in the format requested.”

It was revealed in November that at least 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were thrown away after they passed their expiry date. The NHS has subsequently extended the expiry date of the Pfizer vaccine by two weeks, under concerns that thousands more may go to waste.

RANDOX RUMMAGING

Despite being pressed repeatedly by Labour MPs, it seems that the Government has still been unable to locate the infamous minutes of the meeting between the health firm Randox, Lord James Bethell (a Health Minister at the time) and Owen Paterson (who at the time was a Conservative MP and worked for Randox) – held at the outset of the pandemic.

After Paterson was found to have lobbied ministers on behalf of private companies – in breach of parliamentary rules – there was pressure on the Government to explain the meeting. However, ministers and officials have been “unable to find” the minutes of the meeting since the Paterson lobbying controversy emerged in mid-November.

Ministers have declared that Randox has won £619.7 million in public contracts since the beginning of 2020, though the company insists that Paterson had no role in the awarding of the deals. The Government has further admitted that, as of 10 January, it had yet to answer eight Freedom of Information (FOI) requests related to the Randox meeting.

FOI requests are supposed to be answered in 20 working days, yet one of the requests has remained unanswered for 14 months, since 4 November 2020.