£4billion of sub-standard PPE will be incinerated

UP to £4billion of unusable personal protective equipment will be burned to generate power, a damning report by MPs has revealed.

Officials spent taxpayers’ money on fake or substandard masks and gowns purchased at ‘obscenely inflated’ prices to combat Covid-19.

One contract for 3.5billion gloves was even with a manufacturer accused of modern slavery, the Commons Public Accounts Committee said.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) lost 75 per cent of the £12billion it spent on PPE in the first year of the pandemic because it paid too much or bought kit that did not meet requirements, the report found.

This includes £4billion of PPE that will not be used in the NHS and needs to be

‘Paying obscenely inflated prices’

of. There is no clear disposal strategy for this excess but the DHSC says it plans to burn significant volumes to generate power – despite concerns about cost-effectiveness and environmental impact, the report said.

Nearly a quarter of the PPE contracts awarded are now in dispute as a result of the department’s ‘haphazard purchasing strategy’, it added.

Dame Meg Hillier, Labour chairman of the committee, said: ‘At the start of the pandemic health service and social care staff were left to risk their own and their families’ lives due to lack of basic PPE.

‘In a desperate bid to catch up, the Government splurged huge amounts of money, paying obscenely inflated prices and payments to middlemen in a chaotic rush during which they chucked out even the most cursory due diligence.’

Furthermore, there remain too few signs that the department is putting its house in order or knows how to do so, Dame Meg added. The DHSC has written £8.7billion off the value of the £12billion it spent on PPE in 2020-21.