Matt Hancock under pressure to explain £30m test tube work for ex-neighbour
Alex Bourne’s firm only recently gained safety certification for Covid testing product and had no experience in medical supplies
Felicity Lawrence
Tue 1 Dec 2020 06.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 1 Dec 2020 09.36 GMT
theguardian.com
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Bourne’s lawyers initially denied that their client had any discussions with Hancock in relation to Covid-19 supplies. However, Bourne later conceded that he had exchanged text and email messages and had conversations with Hancock over several months – but denied they had ever involved discussion of his business interests.
His lawyers said it was “untrue” Bourne was helped “in any way, commercially or operationally” by Hancock. “To suggest that our client has had political, indeed ministerial, help is to betray a deeply regrettable lack of understanding of how the supply chain works,” they said.
However, it remains unclear how Bourne’s company came to be awarded the work supplying millions of vials via two distributors. He said that after contacting Hancock via WhatsApp the health secretary directed him to a DHSC website where he registered his company’s credentials. He said there was no further follow-up with Hancock.
A couple of weeks later, he said he received a call from a US multinational he had never heard of, called VWR, which had a pre-existing contract with the DHSC. After weeks of negotiations, VWR contracted Bourne’s firm to begin producing medical vials.
VWR declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about how it came to contact a small company with no prior track record in medical supplies and whether it had sold on the supplies with or without CE marks. A spokesman said that VWR was trusted around the world and while it had received NHS orders for Hinpack test tubes, it had not had any recently.
Since August, Hinpack has been supplying a new distributor, Alpha Laboratories, which also had a pre-existing contract with the DHSC. In a statement, Alpha Laboratories said it was aware Bourne had met Hancock but “this was irrelevant to our discussions as we were sourcing from Hinpack a price-competitive product for the NHS supply chain which fitted within our product range”.
When asked whether it had supplied Hinpack vials to fulfil its NHS test-and-trace contracts, and whether they were CE marked, the distributor responded that the product it supplied the government “meets the specification of the contract in question. The final application of any products supplied by us is unknown.”
Lawyers for Bourne said many UK companies had “retooled” during the pandemic, adding that the medical devices he manufactured were “by no means complicated and are well within our client’s existing skillset”. The DHSC spokesperson said there was “no evidence” to support claims that Hinpack received any preferential treatment because of Bourne’s contacts with the health secretary.
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