Labour’s proposed covid corruption commissioner: an important signal, but it won’t be easy to get the money back

The UK’s failure to prepare for the pandemic, despite having conducted exercises that identified much of what needed to be done,1 left ministers frantically scrambling to respond. Stocks of goods that would be needed in an emergency, in particular personal protective equipment, were depleted and what existed was often out of date. In their panic, they established a VIP lane, whereby trusted suppliers, which in practice meant people they happened to know, could gain rapid access to civil servants.2 The result was that billions of pounds were wasted. Now Rachel Reeves, the Labour Party’s chancellor of the exchequer in waiting, wants some of the money back and she has said that she will appoint a covid corruption commissioner to recover it.3The case for acting is strong. Labour needs all the money it can get. It will inherit the legacy of over a decade of underinvestment, with infrastructure, in the case…
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