£1.4bn in personal protective equipment (PPE) has been destroyed or written off in what is apparently the most wasteful Government deal of the pandemic. BBC News has more.
Figures obtained by the BBC reveal that at least 1.57 billion items of PPE provided by the NHS supplier, Full Support Healthcare, will never be used, despite being manufactured to the proper standard.
The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was responsible for purchasing and delivering Covid PPE, said it was unable to provide a statement due to the pre-election period.
The Labour Party described the contract as a “staggering waste” while the Liberal Democrats said it was a “colossal misuse of public funds”.
Full Support Healthcare agreed a £1.78bn deal in April 2020 to deliver face masks, respirators, eye protection and aprons – the largest Covid PPE order from a single supplier, accounting for 13% of the Government’s total spend.
Before the pandemic, the Northamptonshire-based company, which was already a specialist manufacturer of PPE, had 25 employees and annual profits of £800,000.
Any profits since the contract was fulfilled are not known because in 2021 the Co-Directors, Sarah Stoute, 50, and her husband Richard, 53, based the business offshore in Jersey for privacy reasons.
They and the company continue to pay all U.K. tax. Neither Full Support Healthcare nor the Stoutes have done anything improper. …
Four years since the first national lockdown in England and Wales, the DHSC continues to store and dispose of billions of items of excess PPE at a cost of millions of pounds a week.
At a press conference on Tuesday morning, the Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said the £1.4bn figure was “not accepted” but the DHSC has not specified a different one.
Ms. Atkins said on the wider point “the whole country wanted us to get the PPE that our front-line staff needed both in healthcare and in social care, and we managed to procure billions of pieces of PPE equipment”.
“That was absolutely the right thing to do at the time,” she added.
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