Has the Government Learned the Lessons of the £9 Billion Wasted on Covid PPE?

The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee reported that of the £12 billion spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) in 2020-21, £9 billion was wasted due to inflated prices or shoddy equipment.

817 million items costing £673 million were defective; some were counterfeit; some PPE was so bad it couldn’t even be given away. The Government had so much PPE it had to burn £4 billion of unused items; two commercial waste companies were appointed to burn 15,000 pallets monthly.

In March 2022, when the pandemic panic was subsiding and the initial Omicron waves had passed, the Department of Health and Social Care was still dealing with the fallout of its panicked procurement decisions. The National Audit Office reported it still had 176 active contracts “with an estimated £2.7 billion at risk”.

In January 2023, the Financial Times reported nearly £15 billion had been wasted, and the continuing storage costs and disposal of unused PPE stood at £319 million. The Mail reported the cost of storing pandemic PPE in warehouses had soared to £770,000 per day – 13.2 billion items of PPE were still in storage.

Because the Government was concerned it was losing the narrative, it released a Covid PPE media fact sheet stating it continues “to sell, donate, repurpose and recycle excess PPE in the most cost-effective way, as well as seeking to recover costs from suppliers wherever possible to ensure taxpayer value for money”.

In July 2023, the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts investigated the PPE Medpro awarding of contracts during the pandemic.

PPE Medpro, a private company, was awarded valuable contracts through a High Priority Lane referral by Baroness Michelle Mone. The company was established on May 12th 2020, and was awarded its first contract worth £81 million on June 12th of the same year. The contract was for the supply of 210 million face masks. A second contract worth £122 million was awarded to the company a couple of weeks late, on June 26th, for the supply of sterile surgical gowns.

The Department received tenders from companies with varying track records, some without any history of delivering PPE. Insufficient time and resources were available to reflect on each offer properly, and the High Priority Lane prioritised conflicts of interest.

So, how will the Government ensure good value for money in a pandemic, ensuring it isn’t ripped off, doesn’t burn dodgy and unused PPE and doesn’t spend outrageous amounts of taxpayers’ money?

In a parliamentary Government PPE Contracts debate, Will Quince, the Minister of State for the Department of Health and Social Care, said, “at the beginning of the pandemic, only 1% of PPE used in the U.K. was produced here”.

Years of buying PPE at the lowest price resulted in nearly all of this vital equipment being sourced from overseas, primarily China. The added costs of shipping it, the environmental disaster of burning it, and the profiteering require a long-term commitment to home-manufacturing of PPE.

Like all good ideas, someone has already thought of it: Gateshead NHS Trust was the first to make its own masks, and 250 jobs were created in Northampton to manufacture high-quality PPE.

We find it strange that the “UKHSA holds retainer contracts with Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Service and University Hospitals Plymouth laboratories which could support surge testing as required”. This text is from a letter to the Science Technology and Innovation and Health and Social Care Committees chair dated September 29th 2023.

UKHSA, or presumably its predecessor, Public Health England (PHE), made extensive use of surge capacity testing during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is prepared to invest in the infrastructure for testing but not apparently for PPE manufacturing. Why?

Awarding companies or middlemen with no prior experience lucrative leads to waste, fraud and profiteering. Home-based manufacturers should be incentivised to provide surge capacity times of increased demand. Eliminating the middleman would save billions in times of need while maintaining the supply of high-quality equipment.

Prof. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.