Matthew Offord
Main Page: Matthew Offord (Conservative - Hendon)Department Debates - View all Matthew Offord's debates with the Cabinet Office
(6 years ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
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Oliver Dowden
The contracts that each Department agrees with the private sector for the delivery of services are very stringent. Each Department is responsible for ensuring their proper delivery, and if the company is not delivering properly, it will be in breach of the contract and remedies will be available. At the point of re-letting a contract, we look at the overall performance of the company concerned to ensure that it is in a fit state to be able to deliver on its promises. There is a dual responsibility between the individual Departments, which set out the terms, and the Cabinet Office, in which I sit, which has overall responsibility for the supplier market.
Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)
Barnet Council has a significant contract with Capita. It also has a business continuity planning framework that monitors liquidity and indebtedness. It reviewed the situation twice last year, and again after the recent profit warning, and the company was shown to be far from reaching the relevant threshold for triggering any action, but in the local elections, the Liberal Democrats are using the issue to scaremonger. I urge the Minister not to take advice or direction from someone who undersold Royal Mail by £1 billion and then called the loss “froth”.
Oliver Dowden
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. Tempting though it is, I shall resist the urge to comment on the Royal Mail deal, but I refer him again to the— [Interruption.] When the Department was controlled by the Liberal Democrats, I do not think the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Sir Vince Cable) would have taken kindly to a Conservative special adviser getting too heavily involved.
I refer my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) to statistics that demonstrate that over half of the contracts that were given to Capita were awarded under the coalition Government, in which the Liberal Democrats played a sterling part. If they want to play politics, I refer them to those statistics.