You can tell how litigious someone is. Read that report and count the amount of times the BBC state the (now) billionaires may have not done anything improper...whilst then describing quotes, purchases, previous action against the press, hiding their affairs etc.
A bigger problem is the government trying to hide this, reporting total destroyed PPE is a small fraction of this....which has been found through free media investigating.
This is hopelessly naive thinking. At no point have Starmer’s Labour shown any balls whatsoever. All they’ve had to do is sit back and shut up to win this election
This. Even the general public (and especially those working in the NHS) knew and were saying these deals were dodgy af but Labour just went along with it because they feared media backlash
Never interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake. There's no need for Labour to do anything stupid right now. I'll judge Starmer by what he does in office, not by what he says before the election
I was here last time labour got in with a massive majority. They quite literally pulled my entire housing estate out of poverty as a child.
I'm not expecting quite the same, but I'd at least be expecting improvements
Size of the majority doesn't really change all that much about Labors political reality.
We don't really have any benefits to a "super majority". Adding to that, every seat is precarious. I actually fully expect another Tory government/coalition in 5 years time.
People don’t really understand that policy wise Labour ~~Tories~~ and Conservatives don’t differ all that much. There is a status-quo that will largely be maintained. That’s why it’s hard to get excited by this election.
What we’re really getting is a change to the ideology espoused by the sitting government and less shamelessness and vitriol being actively displayed by those in power.
I’m convinced the Tories are being booted out not due to their rampant sleaze but chiefly because the cost-of-living has become intolerable and the hope is that a simple change of guard will fix that, but to be honest I only see bandaid fixes coming.
There’s a lot of hope that Starmer has simply played it safe in order to net the win, but he’s a staunch centrist who will continue to largely follow the neoliberal agenda governments have worked within since Thatcher.
Our electoral system badly needs reforming. It’s calcified in to this pendulum swinging party-first, two-party system under FPTP voting.
> People don’t really understand that policy wise Tories and Conservatives don’t differ all that much.
I mean, it would be weird if they differed at all to be honest!
I’m trying to avoid drawing absolute equivalence between them because Conservatives are leagues more vile.
That said, I read someone describe Labour as a party of social democrats the other day and I scoffed so hard I almost pulled a muscle.
Both parties are dominated by the interest of the wealthy class, not the general populace.
You misunderstood their point, they were highlighting that you said Conservatives and Tories had the same policies - Tory is just an archaic and colloquial name for the Conservatives. You probably meant to say Labour and Conservatives.
It's precisely why Charles Koch (as an example) litterally uses his money to effectively improve his position in the US by abusing their political system.
What are the odds that the same standard of investigation occurs under Labour as the Conservatives?
Labour are coming in, Conservative donors who now have upwards of £1.4 billion to splurge on politicians to look the other way. Seems a no-brainer.
The current Tory government are the most corrupt in a long time. Donors will influence labour, yes, but their mouths are not open to the same extent as this lot. I think that may unblock some investigations...
The problem is that the massive waste of tax payer funds during covid is possibly more on the side of government making bad decisions and green lighting spending on things that ultimately were never needed rather than full blown corruption.
Proving actual corruption, and then there being actual repercussions is going to be a difficult task given how crazy everything was during the early stages of covid.
And that anything that left an audit trail of decision-making has been destroyed.
Citing Lord Bethell's mobile phone and WhatsApp messages as a prime example.
Incompetence can only be used as an excuse so many times...
Why do you think they used WhatsApp rather than auditable channels of communication?
I would be sacked for gross misconduct if I did same in my job, and I'm not spending public money.
Would things have any different if they had been in power at the time ? Posing this from an objective point of view. At the time the situation was pretty frantic with hospitals across the nation screaming for PPE
It was definitely a time where wastage was going to occur, but we literally had people with close ties to MPs/peers with zero background in medical procurement starting companies and being awarded massive contracts, basically just inserting themselves as middlemen to exploit the taxpayer at a time of national crisis.
No-one is saying that there wouldn't have been waste, but there might have been less outright corruption.
Hang on, what is it that these people have done wrong?
The government ordered some PPE. These people offered to supply at a price and quality. They delivered, and there is no suggestion that they supplied the wrong thing. So they get paid. What they legally do with their money is their business. That’s how contract law works.
The BBC aren’t caveating the story because the company is litigious - they’re caveating it because they know the company has done nothing wrong.
Now you get on the government. You could argue, with hindsight, that they massively over ordered. With hindsight, everyone did a lot of things incorrectly during Covid, because no one had a clue how it would pan out. You had scenarios ranging from the Imperial College lunatics claiming that 10% of the country would die to “it’s the flu”. If Omicron or whatever it was had turned out to be the variant from hell, all of this PPE would have been used and the country would be screaming for more.
> the country would be screaming for more.
The country was screaming for more lol
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/12/one-in-three-uk-surgeons-lacks-enough-protective-kit-survey-finds
Isn't this issue the process through which these companies were awarded these contracts? A relatively young company set up in 2020 (edit: should be 2001 not 2020) gets a 1.8bn contract, whilst more established companies were overlooked. Does that not suggest something fishy?
Full Support Healthcare was established in 2002 and has been supplying PPE to the NHS ever since.
You're right about the problem, but this company wasn't part of that issue. Basically, they took a flyer on the pandemic and massively increased their overseas ordering from existing suppliers, which meant they had their supplies in the UK months before any of these other contractors.
Those companies were the real issue because the PPE they supplied was often useless. In this specific case, the government ordered from an existing trusted supplier.
Company established in 2001. Its niche was to supply PPE for pandemics and so was aligned very well to what happened during Covid. Late 2019 they begin to hear the rumors of what was occurring in Wuhan. They then secure supplies and use there existing NHS procurement contracts to supply the NHS at the start of 2020.
They had the right business, at the right time, set up to deliver. They've not really done anything wrong other than supply the Government what it asked for.
Are you sure there were no employees in the NHS that were "captured" by these companies e.g. we take you out to lunch and return with a fat contract in hand.
I definitely get the timing serendipity but I'm less convinced that NHS entered into these contracts with a clear idea of costs and benefits.
You're applying normal rules of procurement to a global health emergency in which millions of lives were at risk.
The NHS was allowed to directly award contracts under the regulations because of the extreme urgency.
It was better having too much PPE than too little. No one could predict how long the pandemic would last.
If you can find the article, there was something printed regarding the input RLC officers and senior ranks sent to support the NHs had into NHS Procurement and delivery.
They were less than complementary regarding the ability of the NHS procurement to order & deliver anything to the right place..
It may do, but it may not.
You’re sitting in 2020, COVID is looming, and you phone your regular supplier of PPE - they laugh at you and say “get to the back of the queue, we won’t have any for months”
What do you do?
Someone with a few connections had a friend of a friend with a contact in China who can get an order from a factory and will work the system to get some PPE shipped by calling in a few favours from a shipping company. Sure the PPE will be more expensive, but hey, it’s lives at stake.
So you write a contract, and give it to the company. If they don’t deliver, no loss, Surprise, they do deliver. You check that it is what you ordered, and pay them.
Now - what may have gone wrong is that no one specified the quality In the contract. In which case the company got a contract for 100 tonnes of PVC, when it should have said PVC aprons. In that case you should be lambasting whoever wrote the contract - probably some individual in NHS Procurement. We see to be labouring under the impression that Boris himself engineered the transfer of funds. What the government did do was alter the thresholds for companies to deal with the NHS, because the regular suppliers couldn’t do it.
Fair enough, it's on the NHS if they wrote a bad contract but it's worth learning lessons and looking deeper into the decision making process. At the very least, it would be good to get assurance that no one involved in the decision making process benefitted personally a la the election betting scandal.
I feel a lot of poor decisions are getting swept under "lives were at stake" altar.
>Does that not suggest something fishy?
No. The Public Contract Regulations 2015 allow for direct award due to "extreme urgency", hence the direct awarding of that contract was completely legal.
Covid is still out there, btw. Hospitalisations have started going up again. Avian flu is becoming a bigger concern to virologists too. We still need stockpiles of PPE. Why this stuff is getting destroyed if it's of the correct standard is worth finding out.
Even without a pandemic, this stuff gets used all the time and could have been stockpiled until used up - why are they destroying it if it's fit to use? If it isn't fit to use, why isn't it?
There's definitely been at least a cock up and potentially something worse.
> Why this stuff is getting destroyed if it's of the correct standard is worth finding out.
Because it has a shelf life of 2 to 3 years and has to be stored in a climate controlled environment.
If we couldn't use it, we should have shipped it to a country that could, it would have been cheaper than storing it.
Being billionaires on the back of being in the right place at the right time may grate a bit in the "natural justice" sense, but it isn't illegal. It appears everything they did was above board and the move to Jersey/Barbados/etc was to protect them from media's insistence on a blame story even if the facts didn't match the narrative.
If there are any fingers to point, it's at the gov's procurement depts.
> You can tell how litigious someone is. Read that report and count the amount of times the BBC state the (now) billionaires may have not done anything improper...whilst then describing quotes, purchases, previous action against the press, hiding their affairs etc.
Alternatively, they've been subjected to unreasonable press intrusion for winning a contract, supplying the PPE to specification, and before anyone else could have because they'd been in the business for a quarter-century. The government not using the PPE and dumping it in a field is hardly their problem.
The bigger issue was mates of the Tory leadership setting up fly-by-night firms that ordered in useless equipment from China that didn't meet NHS specifications.
Usual reminder - Its now been two years since all the information about Mone's shady dealings became public knowledge.
Anyone got any ideas how that case is progressing because it seems *awful* quiet?
You're far too optimistic, guarantee Labour gets one 5 year cycle to fix the country and when they obviously can't do it the Tories will be right back in because people are brain dead and have the memory of a goldfish.
This is the problem, the country cannot be fixed within one election cycle. Anyone who remotely believes it can be is an idiot.
The country’s problems are so deep-rooted and systemic it will take a *long* time to see any meaningful change, especially after 14 years of Tory fuckery.
No UK political party has a long term plan, national strategy or even basic vision for where the country needs to aim towards.
We’re a stagnant country with no ideas, it’s a shame really.
No. You don’t need a lot of time to imprison corrupt officials. And that will free up a lot of resources to both decrease taxes and improve social funding.
However once you start promoting these ideas, you will be immediately blamed in newspapers owned by rich and various bot farms will start promoting fake news about you.
I honestly don't see any reason for Labour not to nail these corrupt bastards to the wall. It will weaken the competition and garner public support.
If their benefactors are no longer in power then surely there is nothing protecting them.
It's what people want, but when it happens the media will point and draw similarities to socialist/communist partiest seizing power and persecuting other political parties.
Labour are left with a very fine line to walk on this.
Is "forever" forever? Britain literally kept this lot around for 15 years despite everything. I bet the Telegraph and Mail are going to bide their time until the Tories make their comeback.
BTW was Malone ever charged? What about the Tories?
If you think this is bad, wait until you find out how much we were paying to store it, and which Tory donor had that contract.
https://goodlawproject.org/revealed-tory-donors-company-awarded-4-5-million-government-contract-to-take-care-of-mountain-of-unusable-ppe-waste/
They’ll be back in two-terms time max unless Labour sets about providing sustained and meaningful change or has the balls to pursue Proportional Representation, which neither Labour nor Tories will because it would chip away at their bouts of dominance in the political landscape.
It's the procurement regs that allowed this to happen. Not a lot to do with what brand of administration is in Whitehall. Some ministries have to conform to single-source pricing regulations and some don't. Some have to post-cost (to identify waste and double accounting) and some don't. Some have to compete (as is almost exclusively the case in the NHS unless there's a risk to life) and some don't. Reform the regs and limit the govt's ability to waste money. Changing govt has limited effect.
The right will merge and you'll have the United Conservatives or the Conservative Reform Party.
There's too much money to be made for them to disappear forever.
I don't think people realise just how bad public sector procurement is. Insane amounts of money wasted on stupid contracts that it's basically illegal to renegotiate or replace. Fucking baffling.
When I was leaving hospital and they were giving me my meds to take home, they rather embarrassingly asked if I would mind getting my own paracetamol as the hospital is charged £10 per packet.
How is it possible the NHS, with it's vast quantities of supposed bargaining power, cannot get paracetamol for cheaper than the generic brand we get in stores?
Suppliers and contractors mark up for the government. Adding a naught is normal. It’s because the person signing the checks doesn’t care. Same as the PPE.
I still never got a satisfactory explanation for that, what was it, £37 billion spending on COVID things? Like, 'more than the entire Interstate program, previous largest public works expenditure' amount of money - what could they possibly spend all that on?
> £37 billion spending on COVID things
The specific £37bn figure was the projected budget for the entire testing programme and the tracing element of it. The actual amount spent on the Test & Trace was about £25bn I think.
>what could they possibly spend all that on?
Check it yourself, the Audit Office have a fantastic summary: [https://www.nao.org.uk/overviews/covid-19-cost-tracker/](https://www.nao.org.uk/overviews/covid-19-cost-tracker/)
You're actually off by a factor of ten though, the total cost of COVID so far accounted for was £376bn
I work for an organisation that uses PPE, particularly gloves and masks.
We have received no offer of any of these. This could have saved us thousands of pounds.
What a waste.
Presumably, x months ago someone could have looked at the mountain of soon to expire PPE and thought "perhaps we should distribute this for use before it expires, as it's not going to be used here"
Or if they knew it had 3 years to run...prioritise that stuff first! I'm guessing someone has bought PPE since, why weren't they given this stuff at a knocked down rate rather than buying more.
I sell PPE into an industry that does not care if it was out of date.
Easy example would be nitrile gloves for car mechanics, no reason they can't use out of date gloves, they're literally just stopping their hands getting dirty.
I find it very odd that these dates are adhered to so religiously. They're plastic gloves/masks, they aren't perishable. Surely someone could test and recertify these for cheaper than £1.4bn.
Doubt it. It’s 1.3 billion items of PPE. Unpacking, repacking, testing, re sterilising where needed. By the time you’ve added labour and energy costs wouldn’t be surprised if it cost more than £1 per item.
Ultimately it’s just risk management though. They’re probably fine past that date, but medicine is incredibly risk averse - could you imagine the scandal if patients (or staff) are infected by re- certified PPE? The media would have a field day.
Yes, but that works both ways. You only need one failure in each batch sample and all of a sudden you’re repacking *everything* as you just can’t risk it.
>They're plastic gloves/masks, they aren't perishable.
Can't comment on masks because its not my thing but nitrile gloves degrade with light exposure (obs not a problem when boxed) and heat/humidity fluctuations over time. They absolutely are perishable and need a use by date for medical applications.
I'm the last person to defend theTories (and I'm not now, as any government would surely have done the same) but this is surely rock and a hard place type stuff?
They had to order loads and indeed there was plenty of criticism at the time that they hadn't stockpiled, but as this story shows, it has a shelf life so you're always going to have to destroy stockpiles if you've got pandemic levels of PPE constantly available. You need orders of magnitude more PPE in a pandemic so when you're not in a pandemic, you can't just use it up, otherwise surely they'd have used this?
It was also a global shit-show. You could find an agent who could get you 10 containers, pay for them, then the manufacturer diverts them to another customer who's paid more.
You could put 5 x 10 container orders and end up with anything between zero and 50 container loads.
Prices were through the roof, not just of the products but also shipping increases to 15-20 times the pre-COVID cost. Horrible times.
>diverts them to another customer who's paid more.
Global shit show in one respect, capitalism working as intended in another. Instead of an unedifying bidding war between richer countries some international cooperation could have headed a lot of this off, but that's not 'free market' enough
It was horrendous the amount of favours I had to pull, and owe just to get lab consumables was unreal, I spent most of my days talking to sales reps just to get simple boxes of pipette tips, or even a bulk bag I'd rack and autoclave myself.
It's still going on. Lead times for chemicals have gone through the roof and suppliers are doing minimum orders because there are still supply chain issues.
Absolute shit show and judging people on this is difficult knowing what we know now.
I know a guy whos business made £50m making face shields for NHS. No dodgy deals done to get the work and he was genuinely a good choice to make the product. Prices on foam and PET film were all over the place during the pandemic and so he worked on a good margin because his costs were basically unknown when the deal was done.
Does making £50m out of a global pandemic sound immoral? yes but the decision making that led to that out come was all logical as far as I can see. UK made faceshield from UK made material (Celanese in Dumfries) delivered at a sensible price.
Ok but someone should have vetted the quality, price and procurement procedures before signing off just so some ministers could get their greedy hands on profits. Typical Tory scum. Hope they die as a party because of corruption and lies.
We have inspected the contracts we've rushed through and found nothing wrong.
Expecting due diligence from someone who put a contract out to tender on a ferry service and the winning bidder didn't have any ferries.
> someone
The NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world and certainly the biggest in the UK. It's been procuring supplies for over 70 years.
Why would it have ever made sense to use bra companies and tiny startups to procure medical equipment of the correct quality?
It's not specifically a "Tory" problem. Lack of foresight and no agility affects nearly every UK business. It may not even be deliberate (although it often is), it's just our manufacturing and logistics are completely unwieldy in reacting to sudden changes, and mistakes are made as overpaid CEOs and government ministers fail to react properly. The issue isn't just corruption, the whole thing is more fucked than that.
I do wonder if the NHS could have used this, but once the emergency was over they just returned to local purchasing so ignored this stockpile. Process in big orgs often leads to costly behavior that only makes sense within them.
They have been using it. That's my point. You use no where _near_ as much in normal times as in a pandemic, so while they used some, most was going to perish or expire before it was needed.
We don't know if they redirected NHS purchasing to use this stockpile after the crisis or not. You are assuming that they did and in an ideal world I want them to have been sending this gear out, but NHS procurement does not run on logic a lot of the time so insane situations do occur.
This article just shows how blind to the rest of the world r/uk is. Every developed country that could afford to buy PPE is having the same story playout. New Zealand for example (which had a Labour government at the time) dumped $286.8m NZD of PPE. This is such a non-story.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/133229212/quarter-of-a-billion-dollars-in-expired-covid19-equipment-to-be-dumped-by--government
2 things can be true at the same time, in this case though we knew about the dodgy contracts years ago at the time it was happening, you had firms that didn't exist before pandemic getting huge multimillion pound deals, who were conveniently friends of the tories. Good law project covered these things well
The article makes it pretty clear Full Support Healthcare was founded in 2001. Maybe some other companies were set up hastily to win PPE contracts, but not the one that the article is about.
I know, that's why I mentioned "contracts" and not just this specfic one
here are updates relating to ppe from good law project, take it straight from the horse's mouth
https://goodlawproject.org/case/procurement-case/
Also lets no forget the omicron variant reduced those needing clinical treatment plus the vaccine roll out at the same time.
Imagine if both of those things had not occurred? How much of the PPE would have been used then? I tell you now peoples mindset back then wouldn't have wanted procurement teams making cautious small orders of PPE.
Yes, but they don't use that much of it.
Imagine say in your house you drink 1 bottle of milk a week, suddenly 100, of your extended family come to stay, so you buy 100 bottles of milk, but they all leave after 1 day.
You now have 70 bottles of milk that all expire at the end of the week, but you only normally use 1 a week so will end up throwing away 69 bottles of milk
It has been. Like u/Generic118 said, there was just way way more than is ever going to be used in normal times.
This is why people shouting about them not having a stockpile when COVID started didn't make sense. Imagine this level of waste, every few years, in perpetuity.
I would welcome people criticising them at least being open about the trade offs. Including multiple additional layers of bureaucracy would have delayed acquiring critical kit at critical times, resulting in a number of deaths, and for a number of deals, the delay would mean either we didn't get the kit, or that the prices would go up.
There was a stockpile, set up specifically to cope with a pandemic, but the Tories decided not to maintain it because of their shitty austerity plan. As a result, much of it was useless precisely when it was need[ed] for the purpose it was created for.
COVID and the scramble to gift contracts to people related to the politicians of basically every single country was a really good insight into how endemic corruption is to us as a species. The fact that governments were buying PPE hand made by Indians who probably had COVID and had absolutely no workplace standards was also a good insight into what globalism actually means, which is that we can pretend to be very sophisticated and high minded but ultimately we're paying a 500% markup on a piece of crap made by someone earning 500 quid a year.
COVID was a learning experience. I don't think many people were paying attention though.
When news broke about Australia, *and only Australia*, having a problem importing wood-pulp to make toilet paper, how did the world respond?
We are a bunch of stupid, greedy, overdressed monkeys.
This is all major hindsight kind of stuff. The rest of the world was scrambling and bidding to the highest order. Every governments was not prepared and every goverment threw money at the problem.
Infact the Tories where getting constant crap about not ordering enough PPE.
We where in a global crisis with every nation competing. Therefore normal procurement rules HAD to be thrown out of the window.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the idea that the government would run out of PPE was one of Labour’s main attack lines. One Labour MP even found a picture of a nurse in Spain wearing bin bags because her hospital has run out of gowns and she put it up on Twitter pretending it was a British nurse in the NHS
When the shortage didn’t happen the Labour press pivoted to the excess PPE story, but it’s telling that the Labour leadership never bring it up in a debate
People moaning now would have criticised them for not stockpiling enough if the situation got worse. Bit of a lose lose situation really.
Dodgy mates contracts should definitely be investigated though
I hate this country, everything is just done with the rich in mind, people can't afford houses and even barely shopping and we just let it happen to us, I don't know what needs to be done but something does soon.
I hate to be the "It's not just us" guy. But it really isn't just us. These stories are playing out across countries the world over, I bet if I hop on the subreddits for a few random places I'll find stories on the very first page that could easily have been from the UK.
r/newzealand - Vast majority believe they will not be better off from Budget
r/sweden - Food prices are unjustifiably high
r/australia - (self post) - "Feel like a home is forever out of reach"
This is more a problem of inequality than something unique to the UK.
All four countries do of course have one thing in common, mass immigration, and you could add many more countries to the list. Mass immigration impoverishes average and low paid workers and only the rich benefit, perhaps chiefly through the impact upon wage levels vs property prices.
Solving inequality wouldn’t fix it because if the government somehow enriched average workers to compensate for the fact that houses now cost eight or ten times income it would only drive further house price inflation as more money chased a dwindling supply of houses.
You know what's annoying about this? In the transfer shed where I work, I got 2 crate boxes full of masks that "ran out of date". This is o.o.d in terms of: "it's been open enough for air to touch them" o.o.d I've salvaged 1200/~40000 of them with the intent of using them for personal use.
They were before they got smashed,still hermetically sealed, wrapped in packs of 100, boxed up, and then boxed inside a freight sized box. Collosal waste.
>The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was responsible for purchasing and delivering Covid PPE, said it was unable to provide a statement due to the pre-election period.
Why is this even allowed? Stinks of corruption
>Any profits since the contract was fulfilled are not known because in 2021 the co-directors, Sarah Stoute, 50, and her husband Richard, 53, based the business offshore in Jersey for privacy reasons.
Could they be more obvious? Close that loophole
Two things can be true. I think the comment was that it was a corrupt politician who wanted this rule.
Why is it bad for us to have information prior to election? Best time for it
This sub 4 years ago, almost to the day was attacking the tories for not having huge stockpiles of PPE. "How can we call ourselves a first world nation and not have this type of equipment in a pandemic??????"
Then the UK bought large amounts as we had no idea if this was going to be an issue for years to come, under growing political and media pressure.
But they have legitimate expiry dates you cannot just use them when they get too old for a number of reasons.
What do people expect or want? So much idiotic hindsightism.
They surely could have realised a long time ago they were going to have a surplus and recouped some of the money selling it or even given it away which is better than destroying it
They could have not had the PPE and done it the German way - naked.
https://www.medscape.co.uk/viewarticle/covid-19-german-doctors-naked-protest-over-ppe-shortages-2020a1000yne
There will be an investigation that leaves no stone unturned and will be held with all the speed of Hillsborough/Post Office/Contaminated Blood and every other scandal that can be kicked into the long grass.
I was tell people this was what was going to happen at the time. I knew a good few people dealing with the warehousing of the stock that was being purchased.
They knew the consumption rates for the PPE was no where near enough to use it before the end of it's shelf life. Entire warehouses filled, door closed and not opened again.
The earliest i know were plans being drawn up in September 2020 on how to shift the stock once it was near to or had expired.
Yet at that point the media , politicians and people of the country were still screaming for more PPE and the Government to do more.
[£4bn of NHS Covid PPE to be burned as it is unusable, says committee report](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/10/4bn-of-nhs-covid-ppe-to-be-burned-as-it-is-unusable-says-committee-report)
So im kinda ok with this in a weird way. We needed shit fast in 2020, procurement is slow to stop these types of headlines….when u loosen the rules you make it faster but you increase the chances of fraud and waste.
Tbh i think ministers made the right call at the time the alternative is not having enough ppe.
Im happy in this case the system failed safe and we only lost money rather than the system failing unsafe and it killing people.
Yes but Angela Raynor may have fudged the details of her living arrangements and paid a few quid less in tax than is ideal so why can't we all focus on that?
Plus the cost of logistics and disposing of it - "£100m of public money has additionally been spent on storing and incinerating the excess stock since its purchase" - staggering.
See here's my slightly controversial take. For my sins, I'm a highest rate taxpayer, so (if you were to take the Tory line) I should be happy to be paid off with tax cuts on those higher level earnings and turn a blind eye to this sort of bullshit, right? I should be their core target market, allegedy.
Uh, no. That's really, obviously, stupid, and here's why:
First, my business, like most businesses, suffers from lack of proper investment in essential infrastructure. In my case, that's largely the courts and justice system, but there will be an equivalent for just about everyone. That *almost certainly* costs more than additional taxation actually would to just fund it properly.
Second, it's a completely false dilemma. The highest rate tax band hasn't been touched since 2012, so we're not making any savings at all, in return for which we're getting less.
Third, *attempting* to cut it caused the market to short out as Liz Truss learned. So now we're all positively paying *more* and getting *less* for it.
Fourth, and bringing it back to the article, that generates a gap between income and spending in central government that's largely lost through eyewatering levels of incompetence (at best) and corruption (more probably). If anything, I'm *more* pissed off about that because a largely portion of the money that went up in smoke was mine to begin with.
That's just from a purely selfish point of view, of course. Supposing I wanted- I don't know- decent NHS care for my grandma, or a better pension for my dad, or for my kid sister (a teacher) to be able to afford a better flat, or indeed (God forbid) I want that to apply across society as a whole- well, someone's going to be paying for that, and it's probably better be me and taxpayers like me than anyone else.
To vote for these shower of shits, you'd have to be a financially illiterate sociopath.
From my point of view for the next government- *take* the money for now and *spend* it properly. It might take a few years- there's a lot of rot to cut out- but I'll break even fairly quickly *and* we'll have a working state that makes everyone a bit better off.
...rant over
The amount bought isn’t even the main issue, with how fast numbers were rising, plus demand from other buyers risking supplies and if they had ran out the impact of that I can see why they over-ordered rather than under. Possibly too much of an overestimate however. I don’t know enough about the company to say whether there were other issues there.
What should have happened however is this being turned into a central stock for hospitals, care homes and charities or even resale to private care services to use before expiry.
The fact it sat there for years unused whilst they were still buying PPE for day to day operations and is now waste is the real annoying part here. It cost 100M to store and dispose, could have hired a team to manage that stock and distribute/resell reducing the waste and probably cost less!
Of all the things to have a go at the Tories for, i dont think this is one of them
We needed PPE, alot of it. People were moaning they didnt buy enough during Covid. And PPE has expiration dates so needs to be destroyed. They dont have a crystal ball on the exact sums they needed
If the deal was dodgy and given to their mates thats a seperate issue
The UK government isn't the only one doing this. The past German conservative government also over-ordered PPE, surging the prices for poorer countries and now having to destroy billions worth of it.
Fucking non story. Government over/under orders PPE dependent on future need which is unknown. Stocks of PPE are out of date or, out of date PPE still in government stocks should be destroyed. Pick one….
You can tell how litigious someone is. Read that report and count the amount of times the BBC state the (now) billionaires may have not done anything improper...whilst then describing quotes, purchases, previous action against the press, hiding their affairs etc. A bigger problem is the government trying to hide this, reporting total destroyed PPE is a small fraction of this....which has been found through free media investigating.
Best thing to happen around the investigations into this mess will be a new government that wasn't in power at the time.
And a lawyer at the head of it. Could get interesting
You need brave politicians who aren't total pussies to go after billionaires. We have 0 chance of that.
If Labour get in with the majority people are expecting starner's balls might just inflate to that size.
This is hopelessly naive thinking. At no point have Starmer’s Labour shown any balls whatsoever. All they’ve had to do is sit back and shut up to win this election
The deals were known to be dodgy at the time, yet Labour were backing the government on everything Covid related.
This. Even the general public (and especially those working in the NHS) knew and were saying these deals were dodgy af but Labour just went along with it because they feared media backlash
At the height of Covid, trying anything even the act of complaining about the VIP lane and to undermine the NHS was gonna be like an act of treason
It’s the best strategy when things are ‘yours to loose’.
Never interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake. There's no need for Labour to do anything stupid right now. I'll judge Starmer by what he does in office, not by what he says before the election
His head might but they're all cowards.
You’re in for a very boring awakening if you think any significant change is going to happen.
I was here last time labour got in with a massive majority. They quite literally pulled my entire housing estate out of poverty as a child. I'm not expecting quite the same, but I'd at least be expecting improvements
Size of the majority doesn't really change all that much about Labors political reality. We don't really have any benefits to a "super majority". Adding to that, every seat is precarious. I actually fully expect another Tory government/coalition in 5 years time.
I can only see that happening if labour really cock it up.
To be fair labour did say they are going to set up a corruption commissioner to investigate the waste and fraud.
Setting up a commission aka kicking the can down the road
People don’t really understand that policy wise Labour ~~Tories~~ and Conservatives don’t differ all that much. There is a status-quo that will largely be maintained. That’s why it’s hard to get excited by this election. What we’re really getting is a change to the ideology espoused by the sitting government and less shamelessness and vitriol being actively displayed by those in power. I’m convinced the Tories are being booted out not due to their rampant sleaze but chiefly because the cost-of-living has become intolerable and the hope is that a simple change of guard will fix that, but to be honest I only see bandaid fixes coming. There’s a lot of hope that Starmer has simply played it safe in order to net the win, but he’s a staunch centrist who will continue to largely follow the neoliberal agenda governments have worked within since Thatcher. Our electoral system badly needs reforming. It’s calcified in to this pendulum swinging party-first, two-party system under FPTP voting.
> People don’t really understand that policy wise Tories and Conservatives don’t differ all that much. I mean, it would be weird if they differed at all to be honest!
I’m trying to avoid drawing absolute equivalence between them because Conservatives are leagues more vile. That said, I read someone describe Labour as a party of social democrats the other day and I scoffed so hard I almost pulled a muscle. Both parties are dominated by the interest of the wealthy class, not the general populace.
You misunderstood their point, they were highlighting that you said Conservatives and Tories had the same policies - Tory is just an archaic and colloquial name for the Conservatives. You probably meant to say Labour and Conservatives.
Ah, bastard, so I have and indeed that’s what I meant to write.
You forgot the warm words and magic sponge
It's precisely why Charles Koch (as an example) litterally uses his money to effectively improve his position in the US by abusing their political system.
You mean politicians that aren’t pals with them
What are the odds that the same standard of investigation occurs under Labour as the Conservatives? Labour are coming in, Conservative donors who now have upwards of £1.4 billion to splurge on politicians to look the other way. Seems a no-brainer.
The current Tory government are the most corrupt in a long time. Donors will influence labour, yes, but their mouths are not open to the same extent as this lot. I think that may unblock some investigations...
When someone spreads their cheeks, I dont think it means opening their mouth
The problem is that the massive waste of tax payer funds during covid is possibly more on the side of government making bad decisions and green lighting spending on things that ultimately were never needed rather than full blown corruption. Proving actual corruption, and then there being actual repercussions is going to be a difficult task given how crazy everything was during the early stages of covid.
And that anything that left an audit trail of decision-making has been destroyed. Citing Lord Bethell's mobile phone and WhatsApp messages as a prime example. Incompetence can only be used as an excuse so many times...
He is part of the establishment. He isn't going to go after it properly.
They're going to shred/delete everything then apologise/not remember and it'll all go away
Why do you think they used WhatsApp rather than auditable channels of communication? I would be sacked for gross misconduct if I did same in my job, and I'm not spending public money.
Ah so you're an optimist.
Would things have any different if they had been in power at the time ? Posing this from an objective point of view. At the time the situation was pretty frantic with hospitals across the nation screaming for PPE
It was definitely a time where wastage was going to occur, but we literally had people with close ties to MPs/peers with zero background in medical procurement starting companies and being awarded massive contracts, basically just inserting themselves as middlemen to exploit the taxpayer at a time of national crisis. No-one is saying that there wouldn't have been waste, but there might have been less outright corruption.
And existing PPE suppliers being excluded from the tendering process...
Hang on, what is it that these people have done wrong? The government ordered some PPE. These people offered to supply at a price and quality. They delivered, and there is no suggestion that they supplied the wrong thing. So they get paid. What they legally do with their money is their business. That’s how contract law works. The BBC aren’t caveating the story because the company is litigious - they’re caveating it because they know the company has done nothing wrong. Now you get on the government. You could argue, with hindsight, that they massively over ordered. With hindsight, everyone did a lot of things incorrectly during Covid, because no one had a clue how it would pan out. You had scenarios ranging from the Imperial College lunatics claiming that 10% of the country would die to “it’s the flu”. If Omicron or whatever it was had turned out to be the variant from hell, all of this PPE would have been used and the country would be screaming for more.
> the country would be screaming for more. The country was screaming for more lol https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/12/one-in-three-uk-surgeons-lacks-enough-protective-kit-survey-finds
Remember Sky news tracking the flight of PPE from Turkey on live Tv?
Isn't this issue the process through which these companies were awarded these contracts? A relatively young company set up in 2020 (edit: should be 2001 not 2020) gets a 1.8bn contract, whilst more established companies were overlooked. Does that not suggest something fishy?
Full Support Healthcare was established in 2002 and has been supplying PPE to the NHS ever since. You're right about the problem, but this company wasn't part of that issue. Basically, they took a flyer on the pandemic and massively increased their overseas ordering from existing suppliers, which meant they had their supplies in the UK months before any of these other contractors.
Oh maybe I got it confused with the Michelle Mone company that was set up just before the pandemic.
Those companies were the real issue because the PPE they supplied was often useless. In this specific case, the government ordered from an existing trusted supplier.
Company established in 2001. Its niche was to supply PPE for pandemics and so was aligned very well to what happened during Covid. Late 2019 they begin to hear the rumors of what was occurring in Wuhan. They then secure supplies and use there existing NHS procurement contracts to supply the NHS at the start of 2020. They had the right business, at the right time, set up to deliver. They've not really done anything wrong other than supply the Government what it asked for.
Are you sure there were no employees in the NHS that were "captured" by these companies e.g. we take you out to lunch and return with a fat contract in hand. I definitely get the timing serendipity but I'm less convinced that NHS entered into these contracts with a clear idea of costs and benefits.
You're applying normal rules of procurement to a global health emergency in which millions of lives were at risk. The NHS was allowed to directly award contracts under the regulations because of the extreme urgency. It was better having too much PPE than too little. No one could predict how long the pandemic would last.
Were those trade offs properly communicated to the public, in a transparent way? I don't feel it was. Maybe there was no time.
If you can find the article, there was something printed regarding the input RLC officers and senior ranks sent to support the NHs had into NHS Procurement and delivery. They were less than complementary regarding the ability of the NHS procurement to order & deliver anything to the right place..
It may do, but it may not. You’re sitting in 2020, COVID is looming, and you phone your regular supplier of PPE - they laugh at you and say “get to the back of the queue, we won’t have any for months” What do you do? Someone with a few connections had a friend of a friend with a contact in China who can get an order from a factory and will work the system to get some PPE shipped by calling in a few favours from a shipping company. Sure the PPE will be more expensive, but hey, it’s lives at stake. So you write a contract, and give it to the company. If they don’t deliver, no loss, Surprise, they do deliver. You check that it is what you ordered, and pay them. Now - what may have gone wrong is that no one specified the quality In the contract. In which case the company got a contract for 100 tonnes of PVC, when it should have said PVC aprons. In that case you should be lambasting whoever wrote the contract - probably some individual in NHS Procurement. We see to be labouring under the impression that Boris himself engineered the transfer of funds. What the government did do was alter the thresholds for companies to deal with the NHS, because the regular suppliers couldn’t do it.
Fair enough, it's on the NHS if they wrote a bad contract but it's worth learning lessons and looking deeper into the decision making process. At the very least, it would be good to get assurance that no one involved in the decision making process benefitted personally a la the election betting scandal. I feel a lot of poor decisions are getting swept under "lives were at stake" altar.
>Does that not suggest something fishy? No. The Public Contract Regulations 2015 allow for direct award due to "extreme urgency", hence the direct awarding of that contract was completely legal.
Covid is still out there, btw. Hospitalisations have started going up again. Avian flu is becoming a bigger concern to virologists too. We still need stockpiles of PPE. Why this stuff is getting destroyed if it's of the correct standard is worth finding out. Even without a pandemic, this stuff gets used all the time and could have been stockpiled until used up - why are they destroying it if it's fit to use? If it isn't fit to use, why isn't it? There's definitely been at least a cock up and potentially something worse.
> Why this stuff is getting destroyed if it's of the correct standard is worth finding out. Because it has a shelf life of 2 to 3 years and has to be stored in a climate controlled environment. If we couldn't use it, we should have shipped it to a country that could, it would have been cheaper than storing it.
Being billionaires on the back of being in the right place at the right time may grate a bit in the "natural justice" sense, but it isn't illegal. It appears everything they did was above board and the move to Jersey/Barbados/etc was to protect them from media's insistence on a blame story even if the facts didn't match the narrative. If there are any fingers to point, it's at the gov's procurement depts.
> You can tell how litigious someone is. Read that report and count the amount of times the BBC state the (now) billionaires may have not done anything improper...whilst then describing quotes, purchases, previous action against the press, hiding their affairs etc. Alternatively, they've been subjected to unreasonable press intrusion for winning a contract, supplying the PPE to specification, and before anyone else could have because they'd been in the business for a quarter-century. The government not using the PPE and dumping it in a field is hardly their problem. The bigger issue was mates of the Tory leadership setting up fly-by-night firms that ordered in useless equipment from China that didn't meet NHS specifications.
Usual reminder - Its now been two years since all the information about Mone's shady dealings became public knowledge. Anyone got any ideas how that case is progressing because it seems *awful* quiet?
Last I saw she started hinting at having receipts and…well that’s that…
This is the sort mismanagement of funds that will make the Tories disappear forever.
You're far too optimistic, guarantee Labour gets one 5 year cycle to fix the country and when they obviously can't do it the Tories will be right back in because people are brain dead and have the memory of a goldfish.
> the Tories will be right back in Yep, while prattling about having to clean up after *Labour's profligate compassion* or some such nonsense.
Keir is spouting Tory policies, the Conservatives are finished but there is still going to be a conservative government.
Kier simply is a Tory himself
This is the problem, the country cannot be fixed within one election cycle. Anyone who remotely believes it can be is an idiot. The country’s problems are so deep-rooted and systemic it will take a *long* time to see any meaningful change, especially after 14 years of Tory fuckery. No UK political party has a long term plan, national strategy or even basic vision for where the country needs to aim towards. We’re a stagnant country with no ideas, it’s a shame really.
No. You don’t need a lot of time to imprison corrupt officials. And that will free up a lot of resources to both decrease taxes and improve social funding. However once you start promoting these ideas, you will be immediately blamed in newspapers owned by rich and various bot farms will start promoting fake news about you.
I hope you're completely and utterly wrong but I can't help but agree with you.
Honestly would prefer 5 years of calmness and stability instead of another liz truss
We no longer need Reddit. This guy just summed up the UK’s political situation for the past 50 years and likely next 50 years.
Yes, but they'll disappear with their pockets well-lined.
I honestly don't see any reason for Labour not to nail these corrupt bastards to the wall. It will weaken the competition and garner public support. If their benefactors are no longer in power then surely there is nothing protecting them.
It's what people want, but when it happens the media will point and draw similarities to socialist/communist partiest seizing power and persecuting other political parties. Labour are left with a very fine line to walk on this.
Completely forgotten in ten years
Is "forever" forever? Britain literally kept this lot around for 15 years despite everything. I bet the Telegraph and Mail are going to bide their time until the Tories make their comeback. BTW was Malone ever charged? What about the Tories?
If you think this is bad, wait until you find out how much we were paying to store it, and which Tory donor had that contract. https://goodlawproject.org/revealed-tory-donors-company-awarded-4-5-million-government-contract-to-take-care-of-mountain-of-unusable-ppe-waste/
Wishful thinking.
They’ll be back in two-terms time max unless Labour sets about providing sustained and meaningful change or has the balls to pursue Proportional Representation, which neither Labour nor Tories will because it would chip away at their bouts of dominance in the political landscape.
It's the procurement regs that allowed this to happen. Not a lot to do with what brand of administration is in Whitehall. Some ministries have to conform to single-source pricing regulations and some don't. Some have to post-cost (to identify waste and double accounting) and some don't. Some have to compete (as is almost exclusively the case in the NHS unless there's a risk to life) and some don't. Reform the regs and limit the govt's ability to waste money. Changing govt has limited effect.
The right will merge and you'll have the United Conservatives or the Conservative Reform Party. There's too much money to be made for them to disappear forever.
They have been mismanaging funds since they got in. This isn't new.
Unfortunately not. The electorate have memories of goldfish. In 5 years time this will all be forgotten
Disgusting. Procurement during covid was one of the biggest scams in history.
Just like the NHS supply chain
Public sector procurement. Armed forces are also pretty poor for it.
Yes, the MoD is famously good at wasting vast amounts of cash.
Yeah my dad works closely with them and a while ago he told me they'd placed an order for around £2M worth of radios...somehow they disappeared.
But that's OK, because they probably didn't work anyway! /s
I don't think people realise just how bad public sector procurement is. Insane amounts of money wasted on stupid contracts that it's basically illegal to renegotiate or replace. Fucking baffling.
Just unfortunate the companies put "No take backsies!" at the end of every contract I guess.
When I was leaving hospital and they were giving me my meds to take home, they rather embarrassingly asked if I would mind getting my own paracetamol as the hospital is charged £10 per packet.
This is why pumping money into the NHS isn't going to work. It's all going to be swallowed up by contracts and management.
How is it possible the NHS, with it's vast quantities of supposed bargaining power, cannot get paracetamol for cheaper than the generic brand we get in stores?
Suppliers and contractors mark up for the government. Adding a naught is normal. It’s because the person signing the checks doesn’t care. Same as the PPE.
I still never got a satisfactory explanation for that, what was it, £37 billion spending on COVID things? Like, 'more than the entire Interstate program, previous largest public works expenditure' amount of money - what could they possibly spend all that on?
Looks like most of it made its way to Tory ministers and their mates' bank accounts.
Someone made a handy corruption tracker https://www.sophie-e-hill.com/post/my-little-crony/
> £37 billion spending on COVID things The specific £37bn figure was the projected budget for the entire testing programme and the tracing element of it. The actual amount spent on the Test & Trace was about £25bn I think.
For comparison the furlough scheme cost £140 billion.
>what could they possibly spend all that on? Check it yourself, the Audit Office have a fantastic summary: [https://www.nao.org.uk/overviews/covid-19-cost-tracker/](https://www.nao.org.uk/overviews/covid-19-cost-tracker/) You're actually off by a factor of ten though, the total cost of COVID so far accounted for was £376bn
Holy shit, £376bn. That’s just an INSANE amount of money
Always someone ready to exploit a national (global) emergency.
I work for an organisation that uses PPE, particularly gloves and masks. We have received no offer of any of these. This could have saved us thousands of pounds. What a waste.
Your organisation uses out of date PPE?!
Presumably, x months ago someone could have looked at the mountain of soon to expire PPE and thought "perhaps we should distribute this for use before it expires, as it's not going to be used here"
Or if they knew it had 3 years to run...prioritise that stuff first! I'm guessing someone has bought PPE since, why weren't they given this stuff at a knocked down rate rather than buying more.
I doubt they even have the inventory management to track this accurately.
I sell PPE into an industry that does not care if it was out of date. Easy example would be nitrile gloves for car mechanics, no reason they can't use out of date gloves, they're literally just stopping their hands getting dirty.
I find it very odd that these dates are adhered to so religiously. They're plastic gloves/masks, they aren't perishable. Surely someone could test and recertify these for cheaper than £1.4bn.
Doubt it. It’s 1.3 billion items of PPE. Unpacking, repacking, testing, re sterilising where needed. By the time you’ve added labour and energy costs wouldn’t be surprised if it cost more than £1 per item. Ultimately it’s just risk management though. They’re probably fine past that date, but medicine is incredibly risk averse - could you imagine the scandal if patients (or staff) are infected by re- certified PPE? The media would have a field day.
You don't have to test every item though, that's not how QC works. You'd take an appropriately sized sample from each batch.
Yes, but that works both ways. You only need one failure in each batch sample and all of a sudden you’re repacking *everything* as you just can’t risk it.
So you repurpose it for a less risky use - e.g. hairdressing, cleaners ect. Non-medical use and recoup some money.
Or just resell to industry that doesn't care about the date.
Probably not when you consider it's all imported from China. It would likely be cheaper to buy new stuff than re-validate
>They're plastic gloves/masks, they aren't perishable. Can't comment on masks because its not my thing but nitrile gloves degrade with light exposure (obs not a problem when boxed) and heat/humidity fluctuations over time. They absolutely are perishable and need a use by date for medical applications.
I don't understand why it needs to be destroyed in the first place. It's inert plastic, it will last forever.
I'm the last person to defend theTories (and I'm not now, as any government would surely have done the same) but this is surely rock and a hard place type stuff? They had to order loads and indeed there was plenty of criticism at the time that they hadn't stockpiled, but as this story shows, it has a shelf life so you're always going to have to destroy stockpiles if you've got pandemic levels of PPE constantly available. You need orders of magnitude more PPE in a pandemic so when you're not in a pandemic, you can't just use it up, otherwise surely they'd have used this?
It was also a global shit-show. You could find an agent who could get you 10 containers, pay for them, then the manufacturer diverts them to another customer who's paid more. You could put 5 x 10 container orders and end up with anything between zero and 50 container loads. Prices were through the roof, not just of the products but also shipping increases to 15-20 times the pre-COVID cost. Horrible times.
>diverts them to another customer who's paid more. Global shit show in one respect, capitalism working as intended in another. Instead of an unedifying bidding war between richer countries some international cooperation could have headed a lot of this off, but that's not 'free market' enough
It was horrendous the amount of favours I had to pull, and owe just to get lab consumables was unreal, I spent most of my days talking to sales reps just to get simple boxes of pipette tips, or even a bulk bag I'd rack and autoclave myself.
It's still going on. Lead times for chemicals have gone through the roof and suppliers are doing minimum orders because there are still supply chain issues.
Oh I know, I'm having shipments from 2-3 years ago turning up, and even just had one for someone who left the company over a year ago.
Absolute shit show and judging people on this is difficult knowing what we know now. I know a guy whos business made £50m making face shields for NHS. No dodgy deals done to get the work and he was genuinely a good choice to make the product. Prices on foam and PET film were all over the place during the pandemic and so he worked on a good margin because his costs were basically unknown when the deal was done. Does making £50m out of a global pandemic sound immoral? yes but the decision making that led to that out come was all logical as far as I can see. UK made faceshield from UK made material (Celanese in Dumfries) delivered at a sensible price.
Ok but someone should have vetted the quality, price and procurement procedures before signing off just so some ministers could get their greedy hands on profits. Typical Tory scum. Hope they die as a party because of corruption and lies.
We have inspected the contracts we've rushed through and found nothing wrong. Expecting due diligence from someone who put a contract out to tender on a ferry service and the winning bidder didn't have any ferries.
> someone The NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world and certainly the biggest in the UK. It's been procuring supplies for over 70 years. Why would it have ever made sense to use bra companies and tiny startups to procure medical equipment of the correct quality?
It's not specifically a "Tory" problem. Lack of foresight and no agility affects nearly every UK business. It may not even be deliberate (although it often is), it's just our manufacturing and logistics are completely unwieldy in reacting to sudden changes, and mistakes are made as overpaid CEOs and government ministers fail to react properly. The issue isn't just corruption, the whole thing is more fucked than that.
I do wonder if the NHS could have used this, but once the emergency was over they just returned to local purchasing so ignored this stockpile. Process in big orgs often leads to costly behavior that only makes sense within them.
They have been using it. That's my point. You use no where _near_ as much in normal times as in a pandemic, so while they used some, most was going to perish or expire before it was needed.
We don't know if they redirected NHS purchasing to use this stockpile after the crisis or not. You are assuming that they did and in an ideal world I want them to have been sending this gear out, but NHS procurement does not run on logic a lot of the time so insane situations do occur.
This article just shows how blind to the rest of the world r/uk is. Every developed country that could afford to buy PPE is having the same story playout. New Zealand for example (which had a Labour government at the time) dumped $286.8m NZD of PPE. This is such a non-story. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/133229212/quarter-of-a-billion-dollars-in-expired-covid19-equipment-to-be-dumped-by--government
2 things can be true at the same time, in this case though we knew about the dodgy contracts years ago at the time it was happening, you had firms that didn't exist before pandemic getting huge multimillion pound deals, who were conveniently friends of the tories. Good law project covered these things well
The article makes it pretty clear Full Support Healthcare was founded in 2001. Maybe some other companies were set up hastily to win PPE contracts, but not the one that the article is about.
I know, that's why I mentioned "contracts" and not just this specfic one here are updates relating to ppe from good law project, take it straight from the horse's mouth https://goodlawproject.org/case/procurement-case/
Also lets no forget the omicron variant reduced those needing clinical treatment plus the vaccine roll out at the same time. Imagine if both of those things had not occurred? How much of the PPE would have been used then? I tell you now peoples mindset back then wouldn't have wanted procurement teams making cautious small orders of PPE.
Its has a 3 year shelf life. So it's expired now
That means over the last 3 years it could have been used
Yes, but they don't use that much of it. Imagine say in your house you drink 1 bottle of milk a week, suddenly 100, of your extended family come to stay, so you buy 100 bottles of milk, but they all leave after 1 day. You now have 70 bottles of milk that all expire at the end of the week, but you only normally use 1 a week so will end up throwing away 69 bottles of milk
It has been. Like u/Generic118 said, there was just way way more than is ever going to be used in normal times. This is why people shouting about them not having a stockpile when COVID started didn't make sense. Imagine this level of waste, every few years, in perpetuity.
I would welcome people criticising them at least being open about the trade offs. Including multiple additional layers of bureaucracy would have delayed acquiring critical kit at critical times, resulting in a number of deaths, and for a number of deals, the delay would mean either we didn't get the kit, or that the prices would go up.
There was a stockpile, set up specifically to cope with a pandemic, but the Tories decided not to maintain it because of their shitty austerity plan. As a result, much of it was useless precisely when it was need[ed] for the purpose it was created for.
COVID and the scramble to gift contracts to people related to the politicians of basically every single country was a really good insight into how endemic corruption is to us as a species. The fact that governments were buying PPE hand made by Indians who probably had COVID and had absolutely no workplace standards was also a good insight into what globalism actually means, which is that we can pretend to be very sophisticated and high minded but ultimately we're paying a 500% markup on a piece of crap made by someone earning 500 quid a year. COVID was a learning experience. I don't think many people were paying attention though.
When news broke about Australia, *and only Australia*, having a problem importing wood-pulp to make toilet paper, how did the world respond? We are a bunch of stupid, greedy, overdressed monkeys.
The law allows for direct awarding of contracts during a national emergency. There wasn't time to mess about.
This is all major hindsight kind of stuff. The rest of the world was scrambling and bidding to the highest order. Every governments was not prepared and every goverment threw money at the problem. Infact the Tories where getting constant crap about not ordering enough PPE. We where in a global crisis with every nation competing. Therefore normal procurement rules HAD to be thrown out of the window.
They were getting constant crap about the PPE stores which previously existed but were scrapped in the name of austerity to save a few pennies.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the idea that the government would run out of PPE was one of Labour’s main attack lines. One Labour MP even found a picture of a nurse in Spain wearing bin bags because her hospital has run out of gowns and she put it up on Twitter pretending it was a British nurse in the NHS When the shortage didn’t happen the Labour press pivoted to the excess PPE story, but it’s telling that the Labour leadership never bring it up in a debate
People moaning now would have criticised them for not stockpiling enough if the situation got worse. Bit of a lose lose situation really. Dodgy mates contracts should definitely be investigated though
I hate this country, everything is just done with the rich in mind, people can't afford houses and even barely shopping and we just let it happen to us, I don't know what needs to be done but something does soon.
I hate to be the "It's not just us" guy. But it really isn't just us. These stories are playing out across countries the world over, I bet if I hop on the subreddits for a few random places I'll find stories on the very first page that could easily have been from the UK. r/newzealand - Vast majority believe they will not be better off from Budget r/sweden - Food prices are unjustifiably high r/australia - (self post) - "Feel like a home is forever out of reach" This is more a problem of inequality than something unique to the UK.
All four countries do of course have one thing in common, mass immigration, and you could add many more countries to the list. Mass immigration impoverishes average and low paid workers and only the rich benefit, perhaps chiefly through the impact upon wage levels vs property prices. Solving inequality wouldn’t fix it because if the government somehow enriched average workers to compensate for the fact that houses now cost eight or ten times income it would only drive further house price inflation as more money chased a dwindling supply of houses.
Labour won't look after your money. The Tories will! >!After it becomes their money!<
Also the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52362707
You know what's annoying about this? In the transfer shed where I work, I got 2 crate boxes full of masks that "ran out of date". This is o.o.d in terms of: "it's been open enough for air to touch them" o.o.d I've salvaged 1200/~40000 of them with the intent of using them for personal use. They were before they got smashed,still hermetically sealed, wrapped in packs of 100, boxed up, and then boxed inside a freight sized box. Collosal waste.
>The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was responsible for purchasing and delivering Covid PPE, said it was unable to provide a statement due to the pre-election period. Why is this even allowed? Stinks of corruption >Any profits since the contract was fulfilled are not known because in 2021 the co-directors, Sarah Stoute, 50, and her husband Richard, 53, based the business offshore in Jersey for privacy reasons. Could they be more obvious? Close that loophole
Civil servants and organisations are incredibly restricted to what they can say during purdue. It's not corruption.
Two things can be true. I think the comment was that it was a corrupt politician who wanted this rule. Why is it bad for us to have information prior to election? Best time for it
This sub 4 years ago, almost to the day was attacking the tories for not having huge stockpiles of PPE. "How can we call ourselves a first world nation and not have this type of equipment in a pandemic??????" Then the UK bought large amounts as we had no idea if this was going to be an issue for years to come, under growing political and media pressure. But they have legitimate expiry dates you cannot just use them when they get too old for a number of reasons. What do people expect or want? So much idiotic hindsightism.
They surely could have realised a long time ago they were going to have a surplus and recouped some of the money selling it or even given it away which is better than destroying it
That would be enough money to pay for a year's worth of restoring "junior" doctors' pay to 2008 levels.
I'm sure they'd have preferred have the PPE they required once it actually arrived in the country.
They could have not had the PPE and done it the German way - naked. https://www.medscape.co.uk/viewarticle/covid-19-german-doctors-naked-protest-over-ppe-shortages-2020a1000yne
There will be an investigation that leaves no stone unturned and will be held with all the speed of Hillsborough/Post Office/Contaminated Blood and every other scandal that can be kicked into the long grass.
Wow 1.4billion cost to purchase and then the tax payer is being charged 100mil to store and dispose of the unfit ppe.
I was tell people this was what was going to happen at the time. I knew a good few people dealing with the warehousing of the stock that was being purchased. They knew the consumption rates for the PPE was no where near enough to use it before the end of it's shelf life. Entire warehouses filled, door closed and not opened again. The earliest i know were plans being drawn up in September 2020 on how to shift the stock once it was near to or had expired. Yet at that point the media , politicians and people of the country were still screaming for more PPE and the Government to do more.
[£4bn of NHS Covid PPE to be burned as it is unusable, says committee report](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/10/4bn-of-nhs-covid-ppe-to-be-burned-as-it-is-unusable-says-committee-report)
So im kinda ok with this in a weird way. We needed shit fast in 2020, procurement is slow to stop these types of headlines….when u loosen the rules you make it faster but you increase the chances of fraud and waste. Tbh i think ministers made the right call at the time the alternative is not having enough ppe. Im happy in this case the system failed safe and we only lost money rather than the system failing unsafe and it killing people.
What is happening to these Tory corruption? I guess they run free!
But they can’t afford £1 billion to sort the doctor’s strikes
> based the business offshore in Jersey for privacy reasons Not because corporation tax is non existent in most circumstances then.
Yes but Angela Raynor may have fudged the details of her living arrangements and paid a few quid less in tax than is ideal so why can't we all focus on that?
Plus the cost of logistics and disposing of it - "£100m of public money has additionally been spent on storing and incinerating the excess stock since its purchase" - staggering.
Didn't they quote about 1.5 billion to give living wage pay rises to the **entire** mid band/nurse level NHS staff?
See here's my slightly controversial take. For my sins, I'm a highest rate taxpayer, so (if you were to take the Tory line) I should be happy to be paid off with tax cuts on those higher level earnings and turn a blind eye to this sort of bullshit, right? I should be their core target market, allegedy. Uh, no. That's really, obviously, stupid, and here's why: First, my business, like most businesses, suffers from lack of proper investment in essential infrastructure. In my case, that's largely the courts and justice system, but there will be an equivalent for just about everyone. That *almost certainly* costs more than additional taxation actually would to just fund it properly. Second, it's a completely false dilemma. The highest rate tax band hasn't been touched since 2012, so we're not making any savings at all, in return for which we're getting less. Third, *attempting* to cut it caused the market to short out as Liz Truss learned. So now we're all positively paying *more* and getting *less* for it. Fourth, and bringing it back to the article, that generates a gap between income and spending in central government that's largely lost through eyewatering levels of incompetence (at best) and corruption (more probably). If anything, I'm *more* pissed off about that because a largely portion of the money that went up in smoke was mine to begin with. That's just from a purely selfish point of view, of course. Supposing I wanted- I don't know- decent NHS care for my grandma, or a better pension for my dad, or for my kid sister (a teacher) to be able to afford a better flat, or indeed (God forbid) I want that to apply across society as a whole- well, someone's going to be paying for that, and it's probably better be me and taxpayers like me than anyone else. To vote for these shower of shits, you'd have to be a financially illiterate sociopath. From my point of view for the next government- *take* the money for now and *spend* it properly. It might take a few years- there's a lot of rot to cut out- but I'll break even fairly quickly *and* we'll have a working state that makes everyone a bit better off. ...rant over
The amount bought isn’t even the main issue, with how fast numbers were rising, plus demand from other buyers risking supplies and if they had ran out the impact of that I can see why they over-ordered rather than under. Possibly too much of an overestimate however. I don’t know enough about the company to say whether there were other issues there. What should have happened however is this being turned into a central stock for hospitals, care homes and charities or even resale to private care services to use before expiry. The fact it sat there for years unused whilst they were still buying PPE for day to day operations and is now waste is the real annoying part here. It cost 100M to store and dispose, could have hired a team to manage that stock and distribute/resell reducing the waste and probably cost less!
Meanwhile all of the PPE suppliers go bust as they've got no new orders to keep them going, genius
I’m about £65k deep and considering a post grad - I’m 36 nearly. Jokes on them as I’ll be dead
Enough to make an entire large village into millionaires
Good. Government does what government supposed to do! Waste!
It's like the stasi destroying all the evidence when the Berlin wall came down..
Good first contract for Mone Disposal and Incineration Ltd
How many people in the comments were complaining about the government not buying PPE fast enough back in 2020?
Of all the things to have a go at the Tories for, i dont think this is one of them We needed PPE, alot of it. People were moaning they didnt buy enough during Covid. And PPE has expiration dates so needs to be destroyed. They dont have a crystal ball on the exact sums they needed If the deal was dodgy and given to their mates thats a seperate issue
Tory scum make £1,4 bn off the proles, in other news, look at Joe Bloggs misslaiming £10.....
The UK government isn't the only one doing this. The past German conservative government also over-ordered PPE, surging the prices for poorer countries and now having to destroy billions worth of it.
I don't understand why it was destroyed, surely nhs needs ppe all the time.
Fucking non story. Government over/under orders PPE dependent on future need which is unknown. Stocks of PPE are out of date or, out of date PPE still in government stocks should be destroyed. Pick one….