We pay China £23m a year to store PPE

TONS of personal protective equip- ment (PPE) for Britain’s healthcare workers is being stored by China at a cost of £23million a year, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

And the bill for taxpayers has nearly doubled in a year, prompting Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory Party leader, to lambast it as ‘unbelievable’.

In the first year of the pandemic the Government paid China £12 million to store PPE, which shot up to £23million in 2021-22, Health Minister Maria Caulfield disclosed in an answer to Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting.

Sir Iain said: ‘We make ourselves dependent on China both for the production of PPE and now the storage. We sustain them with extra money, so we stupidly build the threat that will one day hurt us.’

He said the next Prime Minister has to make sure that ‘across departments, stupidity like this is stamped out. We do not need to make ourselves dependent ever more on China’.

The Government has 2.4 billion items of PPE, thought to be worth more than £1billion, stored in units and warehouses in China.

Earlier this month, Ms Caulfield said the current cost of storing PPE in China is £571,742 per week.

Mr Streeting told The Mail on Sunday: ‘The Conservative Government is paying China more every week to store our PPE than Man Utd spend on Cristiano Ronaldo’s wages.

‘If the Conservatives weren’t burning through taxpayers’ money with such carelessness, they wouldn’t have to put taxes up on working people during a cost-of-living crisis.’

The total cost of PPE storage, including in the UK, was £267million in the

past year – up from £168 million spent in the first year of the pandemic.

Asked why China was storing Britain’s PPE and why that cost has doubled year on year, the Department of Health declined to answer.