£1.4 billion worth of PPE from a single Covid deal destroyed or written off
An estimated £1.4 billion worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) bought by the government in one go has been destroyed or written off, according to new figures described as the worst example of waste during the Covid pandemic.
The figures obtained by the BBC under freedom of information laws it has emerged that 1.57 billion items from NHS supplier Full Support Healthcare will never be used.
They were part of a £1.78 billion deal the company struck with the government in April 2020, at the height of the pandemic, to supply masks, gowns, eye protectors and respirators. It was the government’s largest PPE order during the pandemic, accounting for 13% of government spending.
Of the total 2.02 billion items Full Support Healthcare provided in the deal, only 232 million were sent to the NHS or other healthcare settings, the figures show. About 749 million items have already been destroyed and another 825 million excess inventory is being considered for disposal or recycling, the disclosure shows.
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting described the deal as a “stunning waste”.
He said: “We know that billions of pounds have been wasted on corruption and incompetence by the Conservatives during the pandemic, but this is the worst example I have ever seen.
“£1.4 billion for one contract, paying for PPE that was never used, and Rishi Sunak’s fingerprints are all over it. That is money that could have been used to pay the salaries of 37,000 NHS nurses.”
Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, said it was a “colossal misuse of public funds”.
She added: “This is just the latest in a series of damning revelations about the Conservatives’ record of mishandling Covid contracts.
“Instead of this disturbing pattern of waste, shortcuts and lack of oversight, the public deserves transparency about the true costs of these failures.”
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said the £1.4bn figure was “not acceptable” but her department did not provide an alternative estimate.
She defended the government’s purchase of personal protective equipment during the pandemic as “the right thing to do.” At a press conference on Tuesday, she was challenged by the revelation: “The whole country wanted us to get the PPE that our frontline staff needed, both in health and social care, and we have managed to purchase billions of PPE .”
In January, the Department of Health and Social Care revealed that of the £13.6 billion spent on personal protective equipment during the pandemic, items worth £9.9 billion had been written off as faulty or unusable.
There is no evidence that Full Support Healthcare, or its co-directors, Sarah and Richard Stoute, have done anything wrong.
The couple’s lawyers told the BBC: “Full Support Healthcare stock arrived quickly in the summer of 2020, much earlier than most and in larger quantities. It had a shelf life of two or three years. This increases the chance that the PPE products have passed their expiration date.”
The couple’s company is based offshore in Jersey “solely to maintain privacy”, the lawyers told the BBC.
The couple and their business remain tax registered in Britain.