LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s main opposition Labour Party won a vote on Tuesday to force the government to release documents on COVID-19 contracts awarded to a firm with links to a Conservative member of parliament’s upper house.
Labour won the vote after Conservative lawmakers were told by their party they could abstain on the opposition motion which sought to force the publication of documents relating to 200 million pounds ($244 million) of personal protective equipment contracts given to PPE MedPro.
It was not clear whether the government would hand over the documents. Conservative lawmakers said there was no deadline in the motion to force the government’s hand quickly.
“Ministers must now confirm when, where and how this information will be released. This cannot be yet another Tory (Conservative) whitewash,” Labour’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner said.
Opposition politicians have accused the government of running a “chumocracy”, awarding deals to those with family or business links to people in power, including for what turned out to be unusable PPE in some cases.
According to local media, Michelle Mone, who sits as a Conservative in parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, had brought MedPro to the attention of ministers at the beginning of the pandemic.
She has since been accused of profiting personally from the business, charges her lawyers have previously denied. She did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Earlier on Tuesday, PA Media reported that Mone was taking a leave of absence from the House of Lords.
A spokesperson for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said: “I’m limited in what I can say about the specific case given there is a mediation process with regards to MedPro.” He declined to comment further.
The government has repeatedly defended its actions to award contracts quickly at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, saying there was a global race for PPE and Britain had to be competitive to make sure its needs were met.
But since then, there has been criticism over the way the contracts were awarded.
A report by the Public Accounts Committee earlier this year said the government had spent more than 12 billion pounds on protective equipment in 2020–21, 4 billion of which did not meet the standards needed by the National Health Service and so was not used.
($1 = 0.8182 pound)
(Reporting by Elizabeth Piper, Andrew MacAskill and Alistair Smout, Editing by Gareth Jones and Angus MacSwan)
