Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the cost to the public purse has been of procuring personal protective equipment during the covid-19 outbreak; how many items of each type of equipment has been procured; and what proportion of that equipment has been sourced (a) in the UK and (b) from overseas.

To date contracts worth approximately £9 billion have been awarded for personal protective equipment (PPE). The value is based on purchase orders raised which still have to be validated.

Internationally, orders for over 30.8 billion items of PPE have been raised, including 7,444 ventilators, 557 million gowns; over 8.1 billion masks; 1.4 billion items of face protection; 13.7 billion gloves and 6.9 billion aprons (purchase order stats as of 10 July), with thanks to joint working across the Department for International Trade, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department of Health and Social Care and Cabinet Office.