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.
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I’ve put a large cardboard box out two weeks running, which they’ve refused to take; presumably because there’s a couple of tiny polystyrene balls at the bottom. I’ve now burnt box at back of garden and will no longer play their silly game of separating the trash. I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to stop playing.
Time to haul out another idiot politician to pay for the sins of our tyrannical bureaucrats.
It’s getting a very long list of them isn’t it?
I once put some rubbish in a rubbish bin, too.
I know, it’s a good job Marcus Aurelius knew isn’t my real name!
Good Lord!
Oh, not that either?
You’re a monster.
Now you tell us, Marcus!
As the saying goes “no good deed goes unpunished”. I would always recommend not binning anything with your intact name or address on it in case the garbage stasi want to trace it back to you. An indelible marker pen or shredding should do the trick.
At least, through incidents like these, people are starting to see how unhinged the environment movement has become.
Been doing that for years. Didn’t think I’d be worrying about the bin police though.
That said, this news should also be used to emphasise the risk of ID theft. Not only could someone go through the bins to identify you – this shows that someone actually did.
I went round, under the cover of darkness, covertly dumping bin bags full of stripped wallpaper in the neighbours’ bins in the street, the night before bin collection.
It’s when we first moved in and the previous owners were obviously fans of the ‘multi-layer’ approach to wallpapering over the decades. We ended up with our garden shed crammed full of these bags.
You’re meant to take it to the tip but we didn’t own a car then and we’d have had to pay through the nose for the council to take it away. It took several weeks but I got shot of it all. ‘Off-territory’ dumping for the win! Fortunately my neighbours are all very chill and helpful, one even suggested I do that, but god knows how much I’d have been fined in Brighton.
I am a master. I’ve got rid of TONS of waste like this. The council employee at the tip told me to do it when I looked aghast at the prospect of having to pay AGAIN for the council to take a few old bricks. Thing is, my neighbours don’t know about this… arrangement… so like you say, darkness and stealth are key
We put an old car engine in a wheelie bin once, back in the 1990s the bins were much bigger. Council truck groaned a bit when it compacted it but there it was, gone..
When wheelie bins were first introduced, as long as it fitted in the bin, you could put it in. True, dat. That was the whole point of them. The only time one wasn’t emptied was when I filled it with garden rubble…it was so heavy it was almost impossible to wheel the bin, so had to take some out and spread it out over a few weeks!
Well I just call it using your initiative. I feel like as the years go by there seems to be more and more rules for us to abide by. The vast majority being totally pointless.
We’ve got some used beer bottles that aren’t made of glass so can’t be recycled. They’re mega heavy and appear to be made from stone or granite. They’ll be getting off-loaded 2 or 3 at a time down at the bins in the car park at the top of the street.
I figure that as long as I don’t do a secretive dump in the dog poo bin I’m not actually doing anything wrong..
There is actually a bin for dog poo———–It’s called a politicians mouth.
I got rid of a bath by chopping it up and putting a bagfull of it in my bin for each collection. Eventually got rid of it over many weeks. This between the time that councils started charging for DIY domestic waste (by claiming it wasn’t domestic’) and the recent change which stops them imposing these charges.
This has turned into quite the “Dumpers Anonymous Confessional”, hasn’t it? You bloody axe maniac you! Or were you more of a Leatherface, in your weapon of destruction choice?
I am pretty sure that they don’t recycle anything like what they claim. I suspect most ends up in landfill. So they have us jumping through all these hoops for nothing. GREEN has to be the most insidious and disgusting political ideology ever imposed on an easily manipulated public, who thought they were living in a free country. —–Once their gas central heating is ripped out and they have 10 plastic bins in their garden some people might actually wake up one day and say “Eh, what is going on here exactly”?
I find the last part of this story particularly vexing. £400 fine for litter picking. My wife does at least an hours litter picking most days. She has early onset AD. If she is fined for putting something in the wrong bin there will be hell to pay.
#excited is trending in the legal community.
My solution is to dig holes and bury it. Keeps you fit digging and yields topsoil to go in raised beds.
I am jusy continuing the practice of the former owner of my home, who was a haulage contractor for a large nearby chemical company. They paid him to take it away and he tipped a lot of the useful bits and pieces in the back garden. For the last three decades it has yielded much useful stuff for an enterprising cheapskate like me.
For a fist full of rubble?
We found an old coal fire back boiler buried in our garden – didn’t know what it was at first.
Hunger games type behaviour, may the odds always be in yr favour.
In Essex visits to waste disposal sites (“recycling centres” in swamp language) requires prior reservation giving phone number, email addreess and vehicle registration number. I have found the staff who check admission allow some leeway on time which is just as well because local roads are often choaked.
Staff in the centre are very interested in metal waste, so much so I wonder if they sell it privately. There is no assistance available for heavy items.
This seems to me just another way of monitoring the public.
Council waste tips have always been obliged to take metal. Yes, I strongly suspect that the staff scavenge and sell-off the good bits. I’m a bit of a car renovation nut – the local guys have got used to me dumping old driveshafts and suchlike.
This level of micro surveillance and stupidity has not yet reached Scotland, as far as I am aware. The response from the typical Jock would likely be far more colourful than awa’ and bile yer heid….
It is sad then that the typical Jock could not manage “awa’ and bile yer heid….” when the Scamdemic and associated nonsense were being rolled out.
No personal criticism intended.
It’s high time everyone told their councils to F themselves. This is rule without consent.
The level of the fine constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment, totally out of order.
How can it even be a crime to put waste in a bin, it’s not industrial quantities of waste, it was one piece of cardboard.
The Highland Council (SNP) is similarly anal about street litter bins, all sorts of threats and incitement to snitch, horrible notices.
Could the FSU help to challenge this or help organise an appeal for funds.
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
Thomas Sowell
With respect, the people of Brighton shouldn’t complain.
They voted for the greenists.
PS maybe try some direct democracy and sneak out at night and plant some cardboard boxes in the greeny’s bins?
We will soon have a bin that goes out once a year for toe nail clippings. Try not to put it out on the wrong day though or the toe nail wardens will slap you with a heavy fine.
One for the left foot and one for the right.
Years ago (before I retired) after each meal in the company’s dining room we meticulously separated out plastic and polystyrene cups placing them in special containers. One day I happened to be in the service yard where I witnessed the two separate containers being emptied into the back of the same dust cart! After that I made a point of placing plastic cups in the polystyrene container and vice versa.
Simple solution: don’t pay the fine. Inundate the council for evidence of any contract and shower them with FOI requests. Basically, tie them up in legal knots. They’re just out to rob you after all.