Conservative peer Peter Gummer, known as Lord Chadlington, has announced he will retire from the House of Lords following an investigation by the standards commissioner Martin Jelley. The probe found that Chadlington committed five breaches of the code of conduct for peers, including introducing a company in which he had a financial interest, SG Recruitment, to the government in April 2020 as a potential supplier of personal protective equipment (PPE) for the NHS, contacting then Health Secretary Matt Hancock, and providing further advice to the company.
Jelley determined that these actions violated the rule prohibiting peers from "seek[ing] to profit from membership of the house by accepting or agreeing to accept payment or other incentive or reward in return for providing parliamentary advice or services". Additionally, Chadlington was found to have "did not act on his personal honour" by failing to cooperate with two prior investigations that had cleared him. The House of Lords Conduct Committee upheld a 12-month suspension, a severe penalty, after Chadlington appealed, leading him to state he would retire and quit the Conservative Party.
The case centers on SG Recruitment, a small, loss-making agency that was awarded £50 million in PPE contracts through the then Conservative government's "VIP lane" for politically connected individuals shortly after Chadlington's introduction. Despite this, the company (later renamed) went into liquidation in December 2023, owing £1.1 million in taxes to HMRC, and the Department of Health and Social Care rejected the PPE supplied under the first £24 million contract as "unusable". This highlights ongoing scrutiny of the UK government's procurement practices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This investigation was the third by the House of Lords standards commissioner into Chadlington's role, initiated after complaints from the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice group. Previous investigations in 2022 and 2023 had cleared him, but the latest probe revealed that Chadlington did not disclose a key email sent to SG Recruitment's owner David Sumner, introducing him to Andrew Feldman, a close friend of former Prime Minister David Cameron who advised the DHSC on PPE procurement. Text messages and emails published by the COVID-19 inquiry showed Chadlington sought Cameron's help and received Feldman's contact details.
The findings underscore ethical concerns and transparency issues within the British political establishment, particularly regarding the "VIP lane" system that has faced criticism for favoring well-connected firms during the pandemic. Chadlington, an influential Tory grandee, party donor, and close friend of David Cameron, ends his long political career amid growing public dissatisfaction with government handling of crisis procurement, potentially prompting calls for further reforms in the House of Lords.
Source: www.theguardian.com