Committee for Finance OFFICIAL REPORT (Hansard) Joint Order for Personal Protective Equipment between the Department of Finance and the Government of the Republic of Ireland: Mr Conor Murphy MLA, Minister of Finance 8 April 2020 NORTHERN IRELAND ASSEMBLY Committee for Finance Joint Order for Personal Protective Equipment between the Department of Finance and the Government of the Republic of Ireland: Mr Conor Murphy MLA, Minister of Finance 8 April 2020 Members present for all or part of the proceedings: Dr Steve Aiken (Chairperson) Mr Paul Frew (Deputy Chairperson) Mr Jim Allister Mr Pat Catney Ms Jemma Dolan Mr Maolíosa McHugh Mr Matthew O'Toole Mr Jim Wells Witnesses: Mr Murphy Minister of Finance Ms Sue Gray Department of Finance The Chairperson (Dr Aiken): I welcome Conor Murphy, Minister of Finance, and Sue Gray, permanent secretary. Thank you very much for coming before the Committee today. We will endeavour to keep this within the 75 minutes outlined by the Speaker. Thank you very much for taking time out of your busy days. Bearing in mind the sort of issues that are ongoing, we would not have called this meeting unless we considered it to be an important issue. The meeting is to discuss the statements made by the Minister in respect of the joint order with the Government of the Republic of Ireland for personal protective equipment (PPE). The Committee will receive evidence on this matter from the Minister and the permanent secretary. I draw members' attention to questions raised by the Deputy Chairperson in relation to the joint order, which is at page 6 of your papers. I also draw your attention to the full official report of ministerial statements on the Budget 2021, which includes references to PPE, and a joint order that had been placed. This is in response to Mr O'Toole and Mr Givan, on page 7. Members may also wish to consider other items in the Hansard record, particularly statements made by the Justice Minister and the deputy First Minister, which could be germane. I draw members' attention to tabled items, including a copy of the recent Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland memorandum of understanding (MOU), which, I believe, Conor, was signed yesterday. The MOU between the Health Ministers? Mr Murphy (The Minister of Finance): Like most people in these times, we are losing track of the days, but it was done in recent days anyway. 1 The Chairperson (Dr Aiken): OK. I believe that it was agreed between the Health Ministers in both jurisdictions. I ask members to note that, in response to questions on the statement, the Minister made at least two references to the joint order with the ROI Government for PPE. He indicated that the joint order had been placed and intimated that the order had not been secured. He referred to issues that had not yet been resolved, including quantities and specifications of PPE, as well as the potential for competition with other jurisdictions. I would also like you to note the 'The Irish Times' article of Saturday 4 April 2020, which referred to the order not being placed or, indeed, having fallen through. There does not seem to have been, at this stage, a formal statement placed on the Oireachtas, Health and Safety Executive (HSE) or Department of Health websites, although it is understood that oral comments about this were made to those organisations through the press. It was Dr Holohan, the Irish Republic's Chief Medical Officer, who made those statements to the press on 3 April. Minister, would you care to make an opening statement? Mr Murphy: Thank you very much for the opportunity to set out our role in relation to supporting the Department of Health in procurement issues. By way of context, since the emergence of the public health crisis, my Department has developed a Budget that has allocated £12·2 billion in resources and £1·6 billion in capital. We have allocated the vast majority of the £933 million COVID-19 response fund. There is more discussion on that to conclude with Executive colleagues this evening. We have worked with other Departments to develop multiple schemes aimed at mitigating the social and economic impacts of the pandemic, to liaise with the Treasury on its new economic schemes, to produce new procurement guidelines so that contractors and sub-contractors will be paid promptly, and we will work with the Economy and Infrastructure Ministers to press the Department for Transport on support packages for our airports. We have also managed, through the Department, to increase output from 100 laptops a week to 700 laptops a week to ensure that more and more public servants can work from home. It has been an extremely busy time for the Department, yet, despite that, I offered to assist the Department of Health, at the start of the pandemic, with its procurement generally and specifically on its procurement with PPE. I did so for a number of reasons. First, there are a number of vital public services, including Forensic Science NI, the Coroners Service, the Prison Service and the PSNI, that the Department of Health was not providing PPE for, and I wanted to ensure that those crucial services were helped to obtain the protection that they deserve. Secondly, front-line health and social care workers were telling me, and, I am sure, many of you, that they were not being provided with PPE. I wanted to ensure that every effort was made to supply those workers with PPE. Thirdly, the scale and the seriousness of the crisis were such that it made sense to pool our resources. On Thursday 19 March, the Department of Finance offered assistance, and, on Monday 23 March, it was agreed that the procurement teams in Health and Finance would work together. The next day, my Department set up a system to check offers of help from local suppliers and shared those with Health and other sectors. Local supply is crucial because of the difficulties involved in transporting goods by air and by sea. Increasing local capacity will help to maintain economic activity in the short-term and also help with the economic recovery on the other side of the crisis. To date, we have had over 300 offers from suppliers, including Bloc Blinds and O'Neills, to help produce PPE. Orders have been placed for over 50 million examination gloves, nearly 20 million aprons, over five million fluid-resistant masks and over 2·3 million face shields. Delivery is expected in the coming days and weeks. We have also established a multi-disciplinary team to work directly with local manufacturers who are offering to repurpose in order to produce PPE. Invest NI is working closely with us on that. The next step is to provide a longer-term pipeline of PPE requirements so that suppliers have the certainty that they need to gear up and to meet demand. As it would take some time for local companies to ramp up supply, my Department has been exploring additional sources of PPE. I will come to our work with the British Government in a moment. My officials advised me that because the Irish Government had already successfully placed substantial orders from China, it made sense to explore joint orders with them. Dublin agreed to place orders with us, but, before proceeding, my officials contacted the Cabinet Office to clarify whether it had sufficient PPE to supply the North. On Friday 27 March, the Cabinet Office advised us to proceed with order with the Irish Government. Following that advice, my Department forwarded detailed requirements for orders to Dublin that would have provided sufficient PPE for a number of months. Arrangements were put in train to process the payment of around £170 million over the weekend. During the following week, it became increasingly 2 clear that countries with larger buying power had entered the market and had started to secure orders from the same factories that Dublin had been progressing. On Tuesday, I informed the Assembly that I would release further details of the order that I placed with Dublin once I could ensure that we had the right order secured and on its way home. I spoke to the Health Minister about the difficulties on Tuesday night, and our procurement teams held a joint meeting the following day. On Thursday 2 April, despite the best efforts of all involved, I received confirmation that the order would not be fulfilled through that route. The truth is that we needed to be in the market a couple of weeks earlier. However, I have not given up. The Executive, through our bureau and Invest NI officials on the ground in China, are attempting to complete the orders through a different supplier. Those efforts are ongoing. In the meantime, Minister Swann and I have requested a portion of the recent consignment of items delivered to Dublin from China on the basis that that will be returned once we complete our order. The Health and Finance Departments have also been working to procure PPE and other supplies from the British Government. My permanent secretary's contacts in Whitehall have proved extremely helpful in that regard. We were both in contact, last week, with senior Department of Health officials in England to ensure that a consignment of PPE was provided. Approximately 5·5 million items, in total, will be delivered, and the first batch arrived on Monday past. As the Health Minister said earlier this week, there is not a country in the world that can definitively say that it has enough PPE in stock, given the uncertainty about the path that the virus will take.