Personal Protective Equipment: Waste Debate
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Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
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Personal Protective Equipment: Waste
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)
My Lords, in answer to my noble friend Lord Winston, the Minister said that the storage costs would have been greater than the costs of buying the PPE at the time that we did. Can he substantiate this for the elucidation of the House in general and say what those costs would have been for storage relative to the costs that we paid in the end? Perhaps he can give us those figures. If he has not got the information readily available today, maybe he will give them within a week or so.
Lord Kamall (Con)
Had we bought the PPE when it was first suggested that we should be preparing, the initial purchase price would have been lower, probably about £2.4 billion, but there would have been additional costs such as storage, replenishment of expired stock, and disposal of items, because even then there would have been items which had gone beyond their shelf life. That would have pushed the total cost to £13.4 billion.