Millions of unused masks and other Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) bought at the height of the Covid pandemic are to be burned or recycled. The government says it will use the fires to generate power - but a spending watchdog has attacked the cost and environmental impact of the plan.
The Public Accounts Committee said some of the £4bn worth of unused PPE did not meet NHS standards. The report by the Public Accounts Committee - which scrutinises government spending - said that between 2020-21, the Department of Health spent £12bn on PPE, but £8.7bn had to be written off. A total of £4.7bn was written off because the market price of PPE at the end of the year was lower than the price paid at the height of the pandemic. The committee says a further £4bn was lost because equipment, such as masks and gowns, did not meet NHS standards, was defective or not needed.
The committee was critical of the department’s overall provision of PPE at the start of the pandemic describing it as “haphazard” and noting that 24% of the PPE contracts awarded were now in dispute.
Labour committee chair Dame Meg Hillier said: “The story of PPE purchasing is perhaps the most shameful episode of the UK government response to the pandemic. At the start of the pandemic health service and social care staff were left to risk their own and their families’ lives due to the lack of basic PPE. In a desperate bid to catch up the government splurged huge amounts of money, paying obscenely inflated prices and payments to middlemen in a chaotic rush during which they chucked out even the most cursory due diligence.”
She added the department had been failing to comply with rules on managing public money before the pandemic and suggested “inappropriate unauthorised payoffs made to staff by health bodies”, as part of planned large-scale NHS restructuring, was “increasing the risk of this happening again.”
The appalling profligacy the the incompetent and corrupt Tory government seems to have no bounds … 
Having wasted billions of the taxpayers money on useless PPE the government is going to spend more money burning the rubbish they bought … 
