Covid-19: Purchasing Effort

Mike Wood Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

The embassy of one of our major international partners had to send staff to Sofia with a suitcase of money handcuffed to their wrist in order to procure PPE for their health and social care. Does my hon. Friend not think that the Opposition would be better off celebrating the herculean efforts that meant that PPE could be got to our NHS providers and our local authority and social care providers, rather than engaging in such transparently cynical party political point scoring?

[Edward Argar]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. As I said in response to the SNP Front-Bench spokesman, the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar), I hope the whole House could agree on paying tribute to all those civil servants and others who moved heaven and earth to ensure that we got the PPE that we needed for the frontline. That is the most important factor. We did what we needed to get the PPE to protect people and to protect lives.