It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I thank all hon. Members who have taken part in this evening's e-petition debate for their valuable contributions. I also thank the petitioners for initiating it. The public are absolutely right to demand that we spend money with care when we procure vital goods, services and works; I agree with the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) and others on that. I have always set out to be open about the challenges that the Government had to navigate at the height of the pandemic in procuring goods and services in the most urgent of situations. We were required to move at great speed and in an incredibly complex operating environment. The work includes an external, independent and unbiased review by the National Audit Office, two internal Cabinet Office reviews that have now been published, the commitment to a public inquiry into covid that starts next spring, and—a new procurement Bill that my ministerial colleague Lord Agnew and I are drafting, which will provide commercial teams with many more extensive options in a crisis between direct award, which raises understandable transparency concerns, and full-fat procurement, which takes far too long to turn around. The fastest turnaround under the dynamic purchasing system is six to eight weeks to contract award, and on an accelerated basis the very quickest possible process would be two weeks. But that would assume that all bid documentation was in place at the start, so it can be seen that in urgent situations this presents a real challenge. Faced with exceptional levels of global demand, the usual vendors in China who service the NHS's central procurement function very quickly ran out of supply and the world descended on a few factories in that country to bid for available items. In that market context, the Government needed to procure with extreme urgency, often through direct award of contracts, or risk missing out on vital supplies. We have established one of the largest and most diversified vaccine portfolios in the world. We have ordered 32 billion items of PPE and provided more than 15,000 ventilators to the NHS. The focus on those early procurement challenges secured some tremendous successes under pressure but also had challenges. All PPE offers, no matter from where they came, went through the same eight-stage checks. We have already published all known contract award notices and the contract documents for all historical covid-related contracts as a result of High Court judgment in relation to the DHSC's failure to publish some contracts. The Cabinet Office has also now published all Cabinet Office contracts that related to the regulation 32 procedure on direct awards.