advertisement


The Good Law Project

As with the £200k costs thing upthread, the government is using costs as another device to frustrate these legal challenges. It first tried to argue that the GLP had no ‘standing’ (ie, no legal basis for bringing the action); when that failed, it has tried other tactics, such as this pretty transparent attempt to intimidate the GLP into withdrawing the action by outspending it and putting it in an untenable position were it to lose.
 
JimmyB said:
What exactly is a technical breach? There is a law, you either follow and abide, or you break the law.

I didn't kill anyone guv'nor, he was well on his way and I just put him out of his misery. Just a technical breach!

It's all down to the Cummings defence strategy of 'but it doesn't really apply to me'. What point is there to a law that when broken, just elicits a shrug?
Click to expand...

The judgement says that the Department of Health (my employers; and I am professionally involved in this) had acted unlawfully in failing to publish a Contract Award Notice within the time specified in the procurement regs.

This is not the same as, say, a criminal act. It's also not really the same as a Freedom of Information Act request. I don't think GLP had FoI'd us on it (thought I might be wrong)

In terms of penalty or redress, that depends on what the Claimant is seeking - and in this case it seems the judgement simply stands. We had pretty much straightforwardly already agreed that we hadn't done it as quickly as we should in any case.

Secretaries of State (or more accurately, the Departments for which they are legally responsible) have been held under JR to have acted "unlawfully" many times in the past. At the point where you're trying to do something, it's a question of balancing risks.

These as ever are my personal views, and not those of my employer.
 
Tim Jones said:
The judgement says that the Department of Health (my employers; and I am professionally involved in this) had acted unlawfully in failing to publish a Contract Award Notice within the time specified in the procurement regs.

This is not the same as, say, a criminal act. It's also not really the same as a Freedom of Information Act request. I don't think GLP had FoI'd us on it (thought I might be wrong)

In terms of penalty or redress, that depends on what the Claimant is seeking - and in this case it seems the judgement simply stands. We had pretty much straightforwardly already agreed that we hadn't done it as quickly as we should in any case.

Secretaries of State (or more accurately, the Departments for which they are legally responsible) have been held under JR to have acted "unlawfully" many times in the past. At the point where you're trying to do something, it's a question of balancing risks.

These as ever are my personal views, and not those of my employer.
Click to expand...

And the £200k plus spent on defending it?
 
Tim Jones said:
The judgement says that the Department of Health (my employers; and I am professionally involved in this) had acted unlawfully in failing to publish a Contract Award Notice within the time specified in the procurement regs.

This is not the same as, say, a criminal act. It's also not really the same as a Freedom of Information Act request. I don't think GLP had FoI'd us on it (thought I might be wrong)

In terms of penalty or redress, that depends on what the Claimant is seeking - and in this case it seems the judgement simply stands. We had pretty much straightforwardly already agreed that we hadn't done it as quickly as we should in any case.

Secretaries of State (or more accurately, the Departments for which they are legally responsible) have been held under JR to have acted "unlawfully" many times in the past. At the point where you're trying to do something, it's a question of balancing risks.

These as ever are my personal views, and not those of my employer.
Click to expand...
Why bother defending it?
Oh, yeah....free money, might as well for shitz and giggles.
Tim Jones said:
There were further grounds involved in the case - on which we won.
Click to expand...
Elaborate?
 
I do realise that the points I'm making are not going to go down well here. But if I were looking for things that HMG got seriously wrong in handling the pandemic, the late publication of contract award notices wouldn't be right at the top of my list.
 
Tim Jones said:
I do realise that the points I'm making are not going to go down well here. But if I were looking for things that HMG got seriously wrong in handling the pandemic, the late publication of contract award notices wouldn't be right at the top of my list.
Click to expand...

After the hundred k excess deaths, the handing out of tens of billions of pounds worth of contracts to people who have no qualifications, other than knowing someone in government, has to be pretty near the top. As a Swedish colleague said, it’s the kind of behaviour you expect from a corrupt third world country, not a G8 member, it looks utterly appalling from the outside but I guess it’s business as usual from the inside.
 
russel said:
After the hundred k excess deaths, the handing out of tens of billions of pounds worth of contracts to people who have no qualifications, other than knowing someone in government, has to be pretty near the top. As a Swedish colleague said, it’s the kind of behaviour you expect from a corrupt third world country, not a G8 member, it looks utterly appalling from the outside but I guess it’s business as usual from the inside.
Click to expand...

While that will almost inevitably (and quite rightly) be one of many topics of interest to an independent inquiry, it was not the finding in this case.
 
What kind of person batters a defenceless animal to death with a baseball bat?
 
Tim Jones said:
Have you read the judgement?
Click to expand...
Only the quoted excerpts.
I was hoping for the horse's mouth.
Edit. Perhaps a link?
Although I've been googling and the BMJ also portrays it as a victory with no caveats.
eg:

The UK government acted unlawfully in failing to publish details of dozens of contracts awarded without competition for goods and services such as personal protective equipment (PPE) needed during the covid-19 pandemic, a High Court judge has ruled.1

Mr Justice Chamberlain upheld a challenge by the non-profit Good Law Project to the failure by Matt Hancock, health and social care secretary for England, to publish notices for a “substantial” number of the deals, as required by law.

Regulations on public contracts allow agreements to be entered into without tender for reasons of extreme urgency brought about by unforeseen events. But regulation 50 of the public contracts regulations specifies that a contract award notice (CAN) must be published not later than 30 days after the award of the contract.

The Good Law Project is mounting separate legal challenges over some of the contracts awarded to individuals and companies with links to ministers or officials though a so-called VIP lane. Given the large number of contracts concluded without competition, it argued that the public would have no way of knowing that a contract existed without the publication of a CAN.

The judge also ruled that the government acted unlawfully by failing to comply with its own transparency policy.

The obligations imposed by regulation 50 and the transparency policy “serve a vital public function and that function was no less important during a pandemic,” Chamberlain said. “The secretary of state spent vast quantities of public money on pandemic related procurements during 2020. The public were entitled to see who this money was going to, what it was being spent on, and how the relevant contracts were awarded.”

This was important, he said, not only so competitors could understand whether the obligations owed them under the regulations had been breached, but so that oversight bodies such as the National Audit Office, as well as parliament and the public, “could scrutinise and ask questions about this expenditure.” He criticised the government for persisting in defending the claim and insisting that it was guilty of only “technical” breaches.”

“On receipt of the letter before claim, the sensible course would have been candidly to admit, as the documents now disclosed indicate must have been apparent, that in a substantial number of cases the secretary of state had breached regulation 50, to explain why this had happened, and to undertake to publish the outstanding CANs within a reasonable period,” he said.

“If that had been done, this litigation, which by the time of the hearing had cost the secretary of state alone some £207 000 (€239 000, $290 000), might not have been necessary.”

Following the judgment, the Good Law Project wrote to Hancock urging him to publish outstanding contracts and the names of companies who went through the VIP lane. The letter called on him to commit to recovering money from all those who failed to deliver compliant product and undertaking a public inquiry into the handling of PPE procurement.
 
Today looks to have gone well. The Tory's attempts to price the Good Law Project out of applying basic public scrutiny (using our tax money, obviously) has been thrown out and a cost cap has been awarded. Hopefully this shameful shower of crooks and shysters will now be placed under the brightest possible spotlight. Updates here on Twitter.
 
Tony L said:
Today looks to have gone well. The Tory's attempts to price the Good Law Project out of applying basic public scrutiny (using our tax money, obviously) has been thrown out and a cost cap has been awarded. Hopefully this shameful shower of crooks and shysters will now be placed under the brightest possible spotlight. Updates here on Twitter.
Click to expand...
Great. Hadn't heard.Thanks.
 
Tony L said:
Today looks to have gone well. The Tory's attempts to price the Good Law Project out of applying basic public scrutiny (using our tax money, obviously) has been thrown out and a cost cap has been awarded. Hopefully this shameful shower of crooks and shysters will now be placed under the brightest possible spotlight. Updates here on Twitter.
Click to expand...
It is 250k rather than the 100k they were asking for. So donations very welcome.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top