The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is refusing to pay just £1,400 to analyse personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts worth £14.7bn, Health & Protection can reveal.
The Conservative government has been pushed to publish details of the controversial contracts including which sub-contractors and intermediaries have been used and how much they have been paid but has continually refused, at one point citing “disproportionate” costs of doing so.
Earlier this year, in response to written questions by crossbench peer Lord Alton, the DHSC said it would not conduct an analysis of who had been paid for each contract as it would cost more than £850.
At the time Health & Protection asked the DHSC 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.
Now following a Freedom of Information request, Health & Protection can reveal it would cost just £1,400 to do so – approximately 0.00001% of the cost of the contracts themselves.
In its response the government said 10 minutes to review each of the 339 contracts at £25 per hour would cost £1,400 and so it was not possible to collate the information within the £850 cost allocation.
“Our assessment was that answering the original question would require detailed analysis of 339 contracts and that it would cost more than £2.51 per contract to perform that analysis,” it said.
“Costs therefore exceeded the £850 limit for disproportionate costs for responding to a Parliamentary Question.
“We have subsequently examined the figures in more detail. Activities would include finding, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.
“It would take an average of at least 10 minutes to review each contract, at an hourly rate of £25. This yields an overall cost estimate of over £1,400,” it added.