UK govt to burn £4bn in 'unusable' PPE, PAC report
Protective clothing for NHS staff worth £4bn bought at the start of the Covid pandemic will have to be burned because it is unusable, a parliamentary report revealed on Friday.
The cross-party House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which scrutinises spending by government departments, said the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) “has no clear disposal strategy for this excess PPE”.
It added that the department plans to burn “significant volumes and will aim to generate power from this”.
In fact, there is so much unusable PPE the DHSC has appointed two commercial waste firms to help it dispose of 15,000 pallets a month through a combination of recycling and burning to generate power.
The procurement of gloves, masks and gowns has become a major scandal, with the government setting up a controversial “VIP lane” that gave access to friends and contacts of Conservative ministers, including the then health secretary Matt Hancock.
“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,” PAC chair Meg Hillier.
“This has left us with massive public contracts now under investigation by the National Crime Agency or in dispute because of allegations of modern slavery in the supply chain.”
A DHSC review of the 364 PPE contracts it signed found that 176, or almost half, were questionable. Of those, 24% are under commercial renegotiation, legal review or in mediation.
Pat Cullen, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said the revelations were “galling [and] a painful reminder of the worst of the pandemic – inadequate or wasteful PPE”.