'Shameful' pandemic response sees £4bn of unusable PPE go up in smoke

The government plans to burn £4bn of unusable PPE to generate power - a move that has been criticised by a spending watchdog as a “shameful” chapter in its 'haphazard' buying strategy.

Unusable PPE will be burned by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) after it lost 75 per cent of the £12bn it spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) in 2020/21 by paying inflated prices and receiving equipment that did not meet requirements.

The DHSC has already written £8.7bn off the value of the £12bn it spent on PPE in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and has £4bn of PPE in storage that will not be used in the NHS.

A report published by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) revealed: ‘The Department has no clear disposal strategy for this excess PPE but told us that it plans to burn significant volumes and will aim to generate power from this’.

The Department will pay for the disposal of millions of items of PPE and is appointing two commercial waste partners to help them dispose of 15,000 pallets a month by burning it and recycling to generate power.

But the PAC report warned: ’The costs and environmental impact of disposing of the excess and unusable PPE is unclear’.

'Shameful' pandemic response

Dame Meg Hillier MP, chair of the PAC, said: “The story of PPE purchasing is perhaps the most shameful episode the UK government response to the pandemic.”

The government bought 817 million items of PPE costing £673m which are defective and cannot be used, donated or sold to anyone. This includes counterfeit masks and gowns that are not waterproof.

An additional £2.6bn of PPE purchased has not been used in the NHS because while meeting technical standards, it is not the type or standard preferred for use by NHS workers.

A further £4.7bn was written down to reflect that the market price at the year-end was lower than the price paid at the height of the pandemic.

DHSC 'failed to manage this crisis'

Ms Hillier said: “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.

“DHSC singularly failed to manage this crisis, despite years of clear and known risk of a pandemic.”

The PAC report found that as a result of DHSC’s 'haphazard purchasing strategy', almost a quarter (24 per cent) of PPE contracts awarded are now in dispute - including contracts for products that were not fit for purpose and a contract for 3.5 billion gloves where there are allegations of modern slavery against the manufacturer.

'Massive' public contracts are now under investigation by the National Crime Agency.

DHSC makes 'no apology'

The Committee said the report highlighted DHSC’s “track record of failing to comply with the requirements of managing public money even before the further exceptional challenges of the pandemic response”.

The report warned: ‘there is no clear plan for how big the PPE stockpile needs to be and how the Department will build greater resilience into the NHS supply chain so that it can respond at pace to future urgent needs.’

PAC’s report has recommended the DHSC ‘write to us setting out full details on how it plans to dispose of unusable and excess PPE, the volumes and cost (of the PPE disposed of and the related storage and disposal costs) and impacts (environmental or otherwise) this may have.’

The DHSC has called PAC's claims "misleading".

A spokesman for the DHSC said: "We make no apology for procuring too much PPE rather than too little, and only three per cent of the PPE we procured was unusable in any context."