Covid-19: Purchasing Effort

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Edward Argar]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Far be it from me to suggest that hindsight characterises the approach adopted by Opposition Front Benchers, but he is absolutely right. I mentioned the shadow Chancellor, the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves). She also said in this place:

“Those who look after the sick and the vulnerable deserve our protection, and getting PPE to them is the priority of all of us.”—[Official Report, 4 May 2020; Vol. 675, c. 412.]

She was absolutely right and remains right, and that is why this Government did exactly that. Protecting the taxpayers’ pound is hugely important. Equally, so too is procuring the kit that protects lives. In the unique circumstances that we faced at the time in 2020, I believe that this Government made the right choices.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

For context, £9 billion would have given every NHS nurse a 100% bonus on their salary or it could provide the funding needed to solve the issue of autistic people and people with learning disabilities being detained in inappropriate units because no funding is available to support them in the community. Instead, it is clear that large amounts were wasted on unused and unsuitable PPE, some of which, we understand, will have to be burned. I remind the Minister that we could have had a stockpile of PPE in this country if Exercise Cygnus in 2016 had been handled responsibly. Exercise Cygnus showed gaping holes in our emergency preparedness and we have to learn the lesson from that.

[Edward Argar]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady; to be fair, we may not always agree, but she always makes thoughtful points and knows this subject well. However, many right hon. and hon. Members across the House have regularly said that Exercise Cygnus gave everyone everything they needed to know in how to manage this pandemic, which is completely not the case. That was a flu pandemic exercise with a number of preconditions, one of which was that, at a certain point, it was assumed that antivirals would become available within—I think, off the top of my head—nine weeks of the pandemic beginning. That was not the case, because we were dealing with a completely new virus, so although there are valuable lessons to be learned, we need to be very careful about drawing direct parallels.

The hon. Lady rightly talked about the sum of money and highlighted the impact. She is right that £8.7 billion is a very significant sum of public money, but she also must acknowledge that that £8.7 billion was not wasted, because the PPE exists. This is an accounting point about what the purchase price was compared with the value now, with a stable marketplace for that. Only a very small fraction of that stockpile has been deemed not fit for use and, in those cases, we continue to investigate, through contractual mechanisms and elsewhere, what we can do to recover that money.