About £1.4bn worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) has been destroyed or written off in what is understood to be the most wasteful government deal of the pandemic.
Figures obtained by the BBC reveal that at least 1.57 billion items of PPE provided by Full Support Healthcare, an NHS supplier based in Northamptonshire, will never be used, despite being manufactured to the proper standard.
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.
The Labour Party described the contract as a “staggering waste” while the Liberal Democrats said it was a “colossal misuse of public funds
Full Support Healthcare agreed a £1.78bn deal in April 2020 to deliver face masks, respirators, eye protection and aprons – the largest Covid PPE order from a single supplier, accounting for 13% of the government’s total spend.
Before the pandemic, the company, which was already a specialist manufacturer of PPE, had 25 employees and annual profits of £800,000.
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.
They and the company continue to pay all UK tax. Neither Full Support Healthcare nor the Stoutes have done anything improper.
Source: BBC
In other news – NHS confirms patient data stolen in cyber attack
NHS England has confirmed its patient data managed by blood test management organisation Synnovis was stolen in a ransomware attack on 3 June. Qilin, a Russian cyber-criminal group, shared almost 400GB of private information on their darknet site on Thursday night, something they threatened to do in order to extort money from Synnovis.
In a statement, NHS England said there is “no evidence” that test results have been published, but that “investigations are ongoing”. More than 3,000 hospital and GP appointments were disrupted by the attack. Read more
