Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, how many private companies Ministers and officials in his Department proactively approached to discuss their prospective or continued participation in the ventilator challenge.

On 16 March, the Prime Minister launched the ventilator challenge to meet the UK’s need for mechanical ventilators to fight COVID-19. Following a sift of more than 5,000 initial offers of help, Cabinet Office held preliminary talks with potential suppliers and manufacturers and began a process to assess and develop shortlisted designs and scale them up. The programme was headed by a team of officials from the Government Commercial Function in the Cabinet Office. The NAO has published a comprehensive report on the programme which can be found here.

During the process, 12 technical design reviews were held with the teams of companies working together on designs, staffed by clinicians, the MHRA and officials, the reviews looked at the feasibility of a design delivering the full range of functionality required. Those design reviews reduced the list of potentially viable designs down to fewer than 10, who were paired with companies able to provide the components and help with the scale up. In the end around 100 companies were involved in the manufacturing.

As of December, there were over 30,000 mechanical ventilators available to patients across the United Kingdom. This compares to around 9,000 at the start of the pandemic in March 2020. The Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, described this as a “benchmark for procurement”.