Government PPE Contracts

Debate between Brendan O'Hara and Will Quince

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara]

One would have hoped that people in glass houses, having thrown the first stone, would have realised that it was not the best idea.

Let me put on record that the NHS in Scotland used emergency procurement provisions to award PPE contracts without competition during the first wave of covid-19 but, crucially, the auditors are completely satisfied with the procurement arrangements in place and said that there was

“No evidence of preferential treatment or bias”

in the awarding of contracts in Scotland. I believe that that is the significant reason why our overall costs of pandemic procurement were less than a third of the UK’s, and it perhaps explains why the Government are now paying £770,000 every single day to store PPE in China. The Minister will be aware that I have tabled a series of questions today to ask how much of that PPE is still usable, how much of it meets the standards required for the UK, what quality control methods were used in securing it and the proportion of PPE that did not meet the standard required.

[Will Quince]

rose—

[Brendan O’Hara]

I will give way if the Minister can tell us the exact proportion of PPE produced that did not meet the standard in the UK.

[Will Quince]

I will quickly update the House. As of October, we hold 13.1 billion items of PPE and we have disposed of 145,000 pallets of excess stock so far. The majority is stored in UK sites; about 120 million items are still stored in China. The total cost of storage is now below £400,000 a day, so significantly less than the hon. Gentleman says, and the total cost for storage in China is £35,000 a day.

[Brendan O’Hara]

I genuinely thank the Minister for that information and I look forward to reading it in Hansard so I can digest it. If I heard correctly, we are now on half a million pounds a day for storing PPE.

In conclusion, having to do things differently does not give anyone, whether they are a private individual, an elected politician or an unelected politician, a licence to rip up the rulebook and behave as if we live in an unregulated wild west of public procurement. That is why it is vital that these papers are released. The public have a right to know why, while doctors, nurses and other medical staff battled unvaccinated through the worst of the pandemic, and as the public stood and cheered them in grateful thanks, some people with connections to this Government saw only the opportunity to make themselves a quick buck. I predict that this PPE Medpro scandal is the tip of a very large iceberg—an iceberg that will eventually sink this ship of fools.