What a waste! £13m of PPE is auctioned – for just £400,000

MINISTERS were last night accused of ‘burning public money’ after it emerged that more than 70million items of personal protective equipment have been auctioned off for a paltry £400,000.

The PPE items, including hundreds of pallets of goggles, gowns, visors, face masks and hand sanitiser, are thought to have cost just over £13million, based on National Audit Office cost estimates.

But they have been sold for a song – apparently because they would be too costly to store.

The loss was disclosed by Health Minister Will Quince in an answer to a parliamentary question lodged by Labour. He said the Department of Health and Social Care ‘anticipates a total net revenue of over £400,000 through the e-auction pilot [of surplus PPE] between April and September 2022’.

Auction details show 38 lots totalling 72.6 million items were sold between the start of April and mid-August. How much each lot fetched has not been published.

Some of the auctioned gowns were provided by Full Support Healthcare, which received £1.85billion from the Department of Health during the pandemic and whose owners recently purchased a £30million Caribbean villa.

In October civil servants revealed that leftover PPE was being burned at a rate of 580 lorryloads a month.

Labour said the fire sale was another example of the Government’s mismanagement.

Pat McFadden, Shadow Chief to the Treasury, said: ‘This Conservative Government has shown time and time again it has no respect for the public finances.

‘Not only have they presided over 12 years of economic mismanagement, they have crashed the economy and are now burning public money for good measure. The Chancellor talks of presenting eye-wateringly difficult decisions on spending and the Treasury has spent a fortnight floating one potential tax rise after another to fix the Tories’ mess.

‘But before they consider that they must tackle waste and fraud to ensure taxpayers get value for money.’

As of September 26, the UK had 7.4billion items of PPE. Storage costs averaged £2.2 million a week, Mr Quince said.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said last night: ‘We continue to sell, donate, repurpose and recycle excess PPE in the most costeffective way.’