Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, with reference to the Cabinet Office Annual Report and Accounts 2020/21, page 131, published 15 July 2021, which companies were covered by the constructive losses incurred on the Ventilator Challenge Programme.

Throughout the pandemic, we have done whatever it takes to protect the NHS and save lives. This included launching the Ventilator Challenge, which saw more than 15,000 new machines delivered to the NHS, meaning every patient who needs a ventilator has been able to access one.

The Ventilator Challenge was run during the height of the pandemic and the Cabinet Office accepted the higher levels of risk that come with Research and Development projects where time is of the essence, entering into development contracts with a wide variety of vendors. An initial screening of the projects by a Technical Design Authority (comprised of clinicians, the regulator, external experts and officials) identified which ventilators design concepts were most likely to both pass validation and be manufacturable in volume.

Those design teams were issued conditional letters of intent to cover reasonable costs until the next (clinically informed) TDA, when work on the devices considered to be non-viable was stood down. In this way the list of potentially viable designs was whittled down to those that did pass the required validation tests, some of which were then taken into manufacture. There were therefore costs incurred in supporting designs that did not turn out to work, but it was not knowable at the outset which design concepts would and would not be successful.

As highlighted in the NAO report, even including the R&D costs expended on designs that did not progress, the average unit cost of the ventilators developed and manufactured compared favourably with that of the ventilators purchased in the market. Moreover the NAO report into the ventilator challenge remarked that given its overall approach, the Cabinet Office took reasonable steps to control the programme’s costs where it could.