Conservative peer Lord Chadlington is to leave the House of Lords and quit the Conservative party after an investigation found he committed five breaches of standards over Covid-19 personal protective equipment (PPE) deals.
The Lords standards commissioner, Martin Jelley, determined that Lord Chadlington – formerly Peter Gummer – breached the code of conduct by introducing a company in which he had a financial interest to the government in April 2020, by contacting the then health secretary Matt Hancock, and by giving further advice to the company. He also failed to cooperate with two earlier investigations.
The company, SG Recruitment, a small loss-making agency, was awarded £50m in PPE contracts within weeks via the government’s “VIP lane”. The Department of Health and Social Care later rejected the supplies as “unusable”, having paid £24m. The company went into liquidation in December 2023, owing £1.1m in taxes.
The findings follow the third investigation by the commissioner, prompted by complaints from the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice group. Evidence from the Covid inquiry showed Lord Chadlington had emailed an introduction to his friend Andrew Feldman, who was advising on PPE procurement, though he had previously denied facilitating such an introduction.
Lord Chadlington appealed the 12-month suspension, but the House of Lords conduct committee rejected his claim that he had not found the relevant email until a forensic search for the inquiry, stating that “any reasonably diligent search would have uncovered the email”. In response, he said he would retire from the Lords and leave the Conservative Party.
