The UK government has admitted it is not prepared to pay more than £850 to analyse contracts worth £14.7bn for personal protective equipment (PPE) bought during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The government has been pushed to publish details of the contracts including which sub-contractors and intermediaries have been used and how much they have been paid during the last 18 months.
However it refused, saying the cost to do so would be “disproportionate” as it exceeded £850.
The government has been widely criticised for its provision of PPE during the pandemic, with the influential Public Accounts Committee of MPs estimating at least £2bn was wasted on PPE that could not be used in the NHS, and the government has now admitted that figure is £2.8bn.
Health & Protection asked the Department for Health and Social Care several times if it had made an estimate of what it would cost to analyse the contracts and what that value was, but it refused to answer both questions.
Exceed the disporportionate cost of £850
The government’s admission was triggered by a series of parliamentary questions by crossbench peer Lord Alton.
Earlier this summer Lord Alton asked how much had been paid to Chinese companies for manufacturing PPE in the last two years and which companies were used.
The DHSC replied that the information “could only be obtained at disproportionate cost” and that it did not hold a central record of any sub-contracting or PPE procured through intermediaries.
Lord Alton followed up by asking what the disproportionate cost was, if it would collect contract information centrally, and how much it had spent on PPE and lateral flow devices.
Last week, prior to being ousted from his position, parliamentary under-secretary for health and social care Lord Bethell replied that there were no plans to collect or publish data on sub-contractors and intermediaries.
“Collating the information requested would involve detailed analysis of 339 individual contracts and detailed re-validation of purchase order and invoice data. This would exceed the disproportionate cost of £850,” he said.
Lord Bethell added that the total spend for PPE during the financial year 2020/21 was £14.7bn, which included the costs of freight, logistics and warehousing, but the total cost of lateral flow devices was not held in the requested format.
£2.8bn of PPE unusable
A further question from Lord Alton prompted the admission that 1.9 billion items of PPE stock which had cost around £2.8bn was classified as ‘do not supply’. This is equivalent to 6.2% of purchased volume.
“We are considering options to repurpose and recycle items in this category which ensures safety and value for money. Discussions with suppliers are ongoing,” the DHSC said.
This was in addition to the results of a BBC investigation which found one million masks manufactured in China and supplied to the NHS as high grade did not meet the correct level of protection.
The DHSC said further British Standards Institution testing of these masks found they met the lower FFP2 grade of protection and that “wearers should have been afforded protection”.
It added: “We have commissioned an independent root cause analysis investigation and we await the outcome.”
Responding to the government’s refusal, Hong Kong Watch policy director Johnny Patterson said: “The government’s failure to provide adequate transparency on the basis of ‘cost’ is profoundly questionable and cannot be justified in the face of the risk that these contracts have been irresponsibly sourced and given unthinkingly to firms with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“These types of international contracts should be subject to scrutiny, particularly in the wider context of over-dependency on Beijing.”
