Medical waste firm says 150 jobs are at risk
A SCANDAL-HIT firm says the jobs of all its 150 Scottish staff are in jeopardy as it is in dispute with the NHS over the disposal of clinical waste north of the Border.
Temporary storage is being put in place at NHS sites across Scotland to cope with a potential backlog of clinical waste in the wake of the impasse.
Shotts-based Healthcare Environmental Services Ltd (HES), which has 350 workers across the UK, stopped serving the NHS in Scotland after being plunged into financial difficulty in the wake of allegations of stockpiling hundreds of tonnes of waste at its sites.
The Environment Agency is investigating a breach of regulations while HES blamed a lack of UK incinerator capacity for the crisis. The
company says it can continue to work with NHS Scotland if it is paid in advance for the work.
HES managing director Garry Pettigrew said the issues the company has faced have “destroyed this business”.
Asked if they were heading for an insolvency, Mr Pettigrew said: “Not through our doing. We are still trading and obviously we will continue living within our means as long as we can.”
It comes after NHS Scotland confirmed HES would lose its contract with them in April 2019, prompting the firm to announce that its banking facility had been cut off. Now it has warned the impasse is threatening the futures of its Scottish staff.
Mr Pettigrew said: “For the last 10 weeks in Scotland the NHS have been ready to kick in their contingency plan and that has undermined out viability and keeping our staff. Over the last three weeks trailers were appearing at sites with our competitor’s names on them, which makes this unviable at every level.”
The company has invested £13m in the Shotts site to build a new waste-to-energy plant to deal with the NHS waste.
National Services Scotland said three principle contractors would now deal with waste at 28 larger acute sites across Scotland, while a number of smaller contractors would provide collection services to more than 4,000 community sites.