Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the remarks by Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon on 17 November (HL Deb cols 207GC to 215GC), who took the decision to spend £770,000 a day to store 120 million items of PPE in China.

The Government is not spending £770,000 a day to store personal protective equipment (PPE) in China. The average daily cost of storing PPE in China is £106,000 and we are working to further reduce this cost. The business case for this storage was approved in October 2020 by the Department’s relevant accounting officer and was consistent with the governance routes for expenditure on PPE.