The Department for Health and Social Care documents show items costing £673m were unusable, while £750m of equipment was not used before its expiry date.
The largest write-off - £4.7bn - was because the government paid more for it than it is currently worth, now that global supplies have recovered.
A further £2.6bn of equipment was judged to be unsuitable for use in the NHS, the 2020/21 accounts show, but the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) believes it could still be sold or given to charities.
BJ’s profligacy with the tax-payers’ money knows no bounds …
The accounts, compiled by the National Audit Office, do not identify to where that extra £4.7bn was paid, whether in increased prices charged by PPE factories, mainly in China, or in significant profits made by UK companies and their intermediaries.
Gareth Davies, the NAO’s comptroller and auditor general, also noted that PPE procurement had been vulnerable to fraud, as normal competitive tender processes were suspended and multimillion-pound contracts awarded to many companies with no previous experience. As much of the equipment supplied remains in sealed containers, Davies said he had been unable to carry out sufficient checks to be satisfied that substantial fraud had not taken place.
“The level of fraud risk has increased as a result of Covid-19-related procurement,” he stated. “A significant increase in new suppliers, a lack of timely checks on the quality of goods received and poor inventory management all contributed to this heightened risk. In these circumstances … I have not been able to obtain assurance that there has not been a material level of losses due to fraud.”
Fraud and corruption in the government’s response to the pandemic has been endemic - other examples:
Boris Johnson suffered another major blow to his authority on Monday after a Treasury minister staged a dramatic public resignation over the government’s decision to write off £4.3bn in fraudulent Covid loans.
Theodore Agnew, a Treasury and Cabinet Office minister, called the oversight of the scheme “nothing less than woeful” and accused officials of “schoolboy errors” on multiple fronts.
Speaking in the House of Lords, he accused the government of “arrogance, indolence and ignorance” in its attitude to tackling fraud estimated to cost £29bn a year
Matt Hancock acted unlawfully when his department did not reveal details of contracts it had signed during the Covid pandemic, a court has ruled.
A judge said the health secretary had “breached his legal obligation” by not publishing details within 30 days of contracts being signed.
The public had a right to know where the “vast” amounts spent had gone and how contracts were awarded, he added.
The government said it fully recognised the “importance of transparency”.
But Labour claimed the government’s awarding of contracts was “plagued by a lack of transparency, cronyism and waste”.
Lets not forget all the very dodgy deals made to mates of ministers to supply PPE which included a guy who ran a pub yet was given millions.
Lets also not forget the part a former health secretary Jeremy Hunt played in the PPE fiasco when he decided to ignore findings that showed how woefully inadequate PPE stocks were.
Apparently quite a few people have been made rich off the Covid extravaganza…
Nice little nest egg for some of the more astute MP’s…
Watch the news for retirements in a few years time…You can’t be an MP for ever!
The document, first seen by the Politico website, details 47 companies referred to the government’s high priority list for contracts to supply PPE during the covid-19 pandemic. There were £1.6bn worth of contracts awarded as a result of referrals from Conservative politicians.No other political party successfully referred companies through this fast tracked route.
A report by the National Audit Office last year found that firms referred through the VIP lane had a 10 times greater success rate for securing contracts than companies whose bids were processed through normal channels.3
On 18 October the UK’s data privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, ordered the government to reveal the names of the companies placed in the VIP lane within 35 calendar days. The ruling came after a complaint from the non-profit campaign group the Good Law Project that the Department of Health and Social Care for England had failed to comply with a request to disclose the names of the companies that received favourable treatment during the government’s procurement of PPE.
Michael Gove referred Mellor Designs, the firm of Conservative donor David Mellor to the VIP lane. The company was awarded six PPE contracts worth £16.4m. When the contracts were awarded Gove was minister at the Cabinet Office which is responsible for government procurement, and in charge of the office of the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. Mellor donated money both to the Conservative party and to support Gove’s party leadership bid in 2016.
According to the document, Lord Agnew, a Cabinet Office minister, referred three companies to the government’s high priority list. These include Worldlink Resources, a company advised by former MP Brooks Newmark that landed a £258m deal. He also referred Uniserve, which was awarded £204m in PPE contracts alongside its existing £572m contract to handle PPE logistics. It was revealed recently that the government has paid Uniserve £124m for “storage costs” of unused PPE.
Lord Feldman, a health department adviser at the time, referred three companies through the fast lane including SG Recruitment which landed £50m in PPE contracts. The Conservative Peer Lord Chadlington sits on the board of its parent company, Sumner Group Holdings Limited.
The then health secretary Matt Hancock referred four firms subsequently awarded PPE contracts—Excalibur Healthcare, JD.COM, Monarch Acoustics, and Nine United. The conservative backbench MPs Julian Lewis, Andrew Percy, Steve Brine, and Esther McVey and the conservative peer Lord Deighton referred one supplier each according to the document.
Another Conservative Peer, Baroness Mone is stated to have referred the company PPE Medpro, which won two contracts worth £200m just weeks after it was set up. The company was founded by a former business associate of Mone but she has previously denied any involvement in the process by which contracts were awarded.
Dominic Cummings, the former government adviser, is named as the referrer of Global United Trading which won a £350k PPE contract,
Jo Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, said, “We can at last see, in relation to the £12.5bn spent on PPE, the vast financial rewards you could reap if you had a minister looking out for your interests. There was no good reason—but there were obvious bad reasons—for the government to keep the public in the dark about these links.”
He added, “We now need some transparency about the equivalent VIP lane for test and trace contracts, on which £37bn of public money was spent. Now is the time for the fourth estate to show its mettle and get stuck in, investigating any transactions that have hallmarks of out-and-out corruption.”
On 18 November the Good Law Project said that the full list of people who referred companies to the VIP lane ran to 50 names, rather than the 47 leaked to Politico. Among the new additions was current transport secretary Grant Shapps, who referred the firm EyeSpace Eyewear for fast track treatment. The firm landed a £1.4m deal to provide goggles.
in the middle of a pandemic when we had no PPE, no testing kits and supply chains shut down, your idea would be to what ?
Sit there and do nothing ?
Anyone with half a brain would act first to get what we urgently need and then worry about the consequences later - you, of course would still be sat there analysing peoples values and principles while thousands of people die, get sick and the health service collapses.
Mine would be to buy what I could, from wherever I could, at whatever the prevailing price was at that time and hope for the best. But aren’t these articles so kindly quoted by Omah just typical of today’s MSM? Damned if he did nowt, damned did he did summat. The fact remains, the Tory government actually got off their backsides and bloody well did something about the lack of PPE at the time of greatest need. Where were the Labour Party’s MPs and their ideas and so on? Nowhere to be seen, that’s where, except when they could get airtime to berate the Government for not moving fast enough when the WHOLE WIDE WORLD was chasing down the very last face mask, surgical glove and gown.
There were no gowns, visors, swabs or body bags in the government’s pandemic stockpile when Covid-19 reached the UK.
NHS staff say they are being put at risk because of the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE).
The investigation by BBC Panorama found that vital items were left out of the stockpile when it was set up in 2009 and that the government subsequently ignored a warning from its own advisers to buy missing equipment. The expert committee that advises the government on pandemics, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), recommended the purchase of gowns last June.
Panorama has discovered that millions of FFP3 respirator masks are unaccounted for. There were 33 million on the original 2009 procurement list for the stockpile, but only 12 million have been handed out. The government refuses to explain where the other masks have gone.
The government also failed to stockpile visors, the swabs needed for testing and the body bags needed for the dead.
Professor John Ashton, a public health expert and long-standing critic of the government, told the programme the lack of preparation was breathtaking.
“The consequence of not planning; not ordering kit; not having stockpiles is that we are sending into the front line doctors, nurses, other health workers and social care workers without the equipment to keep them safe,” he said.
A Tory shambles from BEFORE the start of the pandemic.
Boris Johnson missed five coronavirus Cobra emergency meetings in buildup to crisis, Michael Gove says
Michael Gove has also conceded that the UK shipped protective equipment to China in February.
The government faced intense pressure on Sunday over its initial response to the pandemic, as Labour accused Johnson of having been “missing in action” during the crucial weeks when the virus first arrived in the UK.
The five meetings Johnson missed came during a period in late January and February where he spent an entire parliamentary recess out of sight at his official country retreat of Chequers (1), prompting Labour to accuse him at the time of being a “part-time prime minister”.
A shortage of PPE for NHS and care home staff has been a repeated criticism of the UK response to coronavirus, with the Guardian revealing on Friday that NHS staff had been told to wear plastic aprons if stocks of protective gowns ran out.
(1) IIRC, BJ was shacked up at Chequers with Carrie and too busy to deal with a pandemic …
Thanks to BJ’s historical incompetency and ineptitude before and during the pandemic, the UK has one of the worst records of pandemic response worldwide …
House of Commons
Health and Social Care, and Science and Technology Committees
Coronavirus: lessons learned to date
Sixth Report of the Health and Social Care Committee and Third Report of the Science and Technology
Committee of Session 2021–22
Covid-19 has been the biggest crisis our country has faced in generations, and the
greatest peacetime challenge in a century. It has disrupted our lives to an extent few
predicted; separated friends and families; closed businesses and damaged livelihoods;
and, most tragically of all, it has been associated with the deaths of over 150,000 people
in the UK and nearly 5 million people worldwide to date.
The United Kingdom is not alone in having suffered badly because of covid-19 and
the pandemic is far from over. Comparing the experience of different countries is not
straightforward: covid-related deaths are recorded in varying ways. The effect of the
pandemic on particular countries has been different at different times—for example
some countries that fared better than others in the early months of the pandemic have
subsequently experienced more fatalities. But in 2020 the UK did significantly worse in
terms of covid deaths than many countries—especially compared to those in East Asia
even though they were much closer geographically to where the virus first appeared.3 The scale of this early loss requires us to ask why the UK was affected worse than others.
@Omah , Simple answer to your question is that UK has a very
high proportion of old and otherwise vulnerable citizens compared to other nations Omah !
The reason for this imbalance is that we operate a universal
health system in this country which promotes keeping people
alive at all costs?
BTW, The UK death figures are for two years and include deaths
from all causes !!
I support your campaign of anti corruption during the pandemic against the government who imo are definitely involved in shady
dealings !!
Keep up the good work !
Donkeyman!
The answer is not that simple - for example, nearly thousands of old people would have lived if BJ hadn’t evicted them, untested, from hospital into care homes.
This report from last year highlights some governmental errors:
Weaknesses in governance led to avoidable mistakes, says Chris Ham, as the UK death toll from covid-19 passes 100,000
The UK’s response to covid-19 compares poorly with that of other countries. The reasons are to be found in an inability to learn from what was known about the virus and to act accordingly. Mistakes could have been avoided if the government had listened to leaders outside Westminster and Whitehall, drawn on a wider range of expertise, and been curious about experience in other countries.
Some of the errors that could have been avoided are highlighted below.
Delays in introducing a lockdown in March are thought to have been responsible for around 20,000 deaths and were compounded by further delays in imposing restrictions in September and again in December when evidence of the benefits of early action was clear. Reluctance to impose border controls and quarantining arrangements has been equally consequential.
Community testing and contact tracing were suspended early in March as the number of cases exceeded available capacity. Substantial sums were then invested in expanding capacity, mainly through the private sector, but initially the government ignored expertise in local authorities despite public health directors and their teams being well placed to undertake contact tracing. It was also slow to provide councils with the information and resources they needed to control local outbreaks.
Support for people asked to self-isolate fell well short of what was needed. The main problem was the failure to provide adequate financial support for people on low incomes to enable them to take time off work when they tested positive.
The overcentralised management of the pandemic was undoubtedly a factor in the failure to learn more effectively. Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, and a small number of Cabinet members were visible in their leadership and appeared reluctant to draw on the expertise and intelligence of the devolved administrations, regional, and local government leaders. Opportunities for learning were lost, contributing to the mistakes that were made. This included the premature lifting of the national lockdown in May when infection rates were still high in the north of England.
These errors were compounded by a lack of diversity among those advising the government. While great store was placed on the contribution of medical scientists through the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, the advice of social scientists was less prominent. Equally important was the sidelining of public health and social care leaders with practical experience of managing the pandemic. The consequences were plain to see in the flawed design of test, trace, and isolate, and in the tragic neglect of social care, resulting in over 20 000 deaths in care homes.
Another factor was lack of curiosity about the experience of other countries and a willingness to learn from them. This applies not only to countries in South East Asia whose success in containing covid-19 has been widely reported, but also countries such as Greece and Norway whose responses much closer to home have been far more effective than those of the UK. A misplaced belief in English exceptionalism, exemplified by the troubled development of a contact tracing app, contributed to this wilful blindness.
These failures reflect a preference for heroic leadership by the few rather than collective and distributed leadership by the many. A more effective path would have involved the government working with the devolved administrations, regional and local leaders in delivering the response and learning from experience on the ground. Shorter lines of communication between ministers and leaders in schools, care homes, general practices, hospitals, and public health teams would have improved feedback and led to better decisions.
Of course, when BJ let in the variants, Indian and South African, he made a bad situation worse … but that’s another chapter of his disastrous response to the COVID pandemic.
At the start of the pandemic, thousands of elderly people who no longer needed to be in hospital were discharged into many of Scotland’s 1,000 plus care homes.
This was at a time when the Scottish government was being advised that spare capacity was needed in wards to accommodate coronavirus cases. It was also before testing was commonplace.
Only on 21 April 2020 it became mandatory for hospital patients to have two negative Covid tests before being discharged, and for all new care home admissions to be isolated for 14 days.
Between 1 March and 21 April 2020 in Scotland, 82% of the 3,595 discharged patients were not tested.
Indeed … it was an appalling decision with catastrophic consequences …
