Government is to blame for the NHS PPE fiasco

YOU can’t blame the Government for the crisis writes Mr. John Dearden (FeedBack, June 3).

Mr Dearden berates Mr Wooley and NHS managers, writing, “PPE is nothing to do with the Government, it is entirely the responsibility of the NHS with its hundreds if not thousands of managers, earning more than £100k pa, who failed to anticipate the need for a cache of five billion pieces of PPE equipment”.

I do blame the Government. The reasons are simple.

The purchasing of PPE for the NHS was outsourced in 2018 to a Government owned commercial company, Supply Chain Coordination Ltd.

Mr Dearden mentions overpaid NHS managers.

What does he have to say to the fact that the CEO of SCCL has a salary of £230,000, made possible by the Government allowing higher salaries for commercial staff?

SCCL was established in response to the Carter Review of NHS productivity. Carter argued that too many trusts buying their own kit was inefficient.

The storage and distribution of PPE to the NHS was also outsourced, to the UK logistics company Unipart with £500m taken away from the NHS to fund the Unipart deal.

In early April the union Unite said warehouse and distribution staff at Unipart (paid £10.24 per hour) were exhausted and struggling to keep up with the demand for PPE.

The Government’s solution was to bring in the army to help support a private company.

Mr Dearden goes on to write “even if NHS managers had excersised the skill of Mystic Meg and stockpiled all that PPE, we would have wanted the heads of those managers having spent billions just in case”.

In the early 2000s a pandemic stockpile was established, its value at 2012 was £750.

The management of the UK strategic stockpile of PPE was also outsourced and the quantity stored run down by 40%. In other words cost-cutting with disastrous results.

Despite the abject failure of outsourcing during the Covid crisis, I’m certain the Government will continue to pursue this dogma in the years ahead.

Mr Dearden gives advice, “to our lefty friends to be a bit more supportive”, my advice to him is to try and separate fact from fiction.

Town centre doesn’t look that clean

I HAVE been reading an article in about the 10 changes that will be in place to allow Huddersfield town centre to reopen..

The article refered to a deep clean carried out in February but as we didn’t go into lockdown till the end of March how was this possible?

Please don’t tell me Hudderfield Bid, who say it paid for this, meant March because if you look around the town you can see no way has it had a deep clean.

Other European countries have shown how they have been on the streets cleaning but Britain has just not bothered.

We need time to heal before Brexit deal

I’VE just seen a new report (from Best for Britain and the Social Market Foundation) on the double impact of Brexit and coronavirus, and feel like I’ve spotted an iceberg on the horizon that everyone else is ignoring.

The report shows that any change to our trade relationship with Europe during the Covid19 recession will hurt the UK economy. The North West and the Midlands regions would face a disproportionately severe impact should we leave the Brexit transition period without any kind of deal.

Brexit is done and we cannot stop it, but we can protect our jobs, our services and our local businesses. However, our communities are already stretched to breaking point by the coronavirus pandemic and we desperately need time to deal with that before we can turn our focus to our changing relationship with the EU.