PPE: a cash bonanza for the lucky few

I wish I hadn’t wasted all that time during lockdown reading books and making banana bread, said Henry Mance in the FT. Instead, I could have made a fortune selling pandemic goods and services to the British Government. Plenty of others did. The National Audit Office (NAO) reported last week that ministers awarded about £18bn in Covid-related contracts in the first half of this year – and it seems they weren’t too fussy about who they dished all this money out to. Some £10.5bn of it was awarded without any form of competitive tender. A “high-priority” channel was set up for PPE bids recommended by MPs or officials, which were deemed more credible. One of the beneficiaries of the cash bonanza was PestFix, a pest control company with assets of £18,000, which received contracts totalling £350m. Another was the small investment firm Ayanda Capital, which supplied 50 million masks that were deemed unsuitable for NHS use.

The NAO report is “by turns damning and jaw-dropping”, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. A Miami jewellery company bagged £250m in PPE contracts, paying £21m of that, with the promise of £16m more, to a consultant who helped them buy the gear. Was there really no other way for ministers to get hold of that kit without paying £37m of taxpayer’s money to a middleman? The sheer waste is bad enough, but worse still is the unmistakable hint of sleaze that hangs over the twin-track procurement process. It is just another example of “chumocracy” under this Government, said Kenan Malik in The Observer. It seems that when it comes to securing a government contract or being appointed head of an official body today, what counts is not what you know but “who you know (or are married to)”.

The procurement scandal doesn’t look good, said Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph, but it’s a story of incompetence and panic, rather than venality. The reality is that the Government, having failed to take prompt action in the first two months of the year, was forced into a “mad scramble” in March to secure essential equipment. Hospitals were running low on kit; demand was outstripping supply of PPE – whenever new stock became available, it was being snapped up. In this frenzied sellers’ market there was little room for haggling over price. What the Government really deserves blame for is its lack of planning and general amateurishness. By all means let’s prosecute corruption if it is found. But the real scandal highlighted by this affair is that “a huge swathe of this country’s top administrators and ministers are just not up to the job”.