UK Wasted £9.9bn on Unusable PPE, Covid Inquiry Finds
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- The Covid inquiry found that £9.9bn of PPE — two-thirds of the £14.9bn total spent — ended up unused or out of date, leaving NHS staff and patients exposed to risk.
- The UK's pandemic stockpile entered 2020 in crisis: only a third of England's masks were usable, Scotland had no high-grade respiratory masks, and the 15-week emergency reserve was exhausted by late March 2020.
- Baroness Hallett branded the VIP lane a "misguided attempt at prioritisation" that embedded unfairness in emergency procurement, but explicitly concluded there was "no evidence of cronyism or corruption" by ministers or officials.
- Total pandemic equipment spending — PPE, home testing kits, ventilators — between January 2020 and June 2022 exceeded £42bn, including £143m on ventilator designs that never went into production.
- Michael Gove dismissed corruption allegations as "unfounded nonsense" on X but accepted responsibility for "honest mistakes" in PPE procurement; PPE Medpro contracts worth over £200m, linked to Doug Barrowman and Baroness Michelle Mone, were examined behind closed doors to protect an ongoing National Crime Agency investigation.
- The inquiry's recommendations include a "radical overhaul" of emergency PPE procurement, a domestic industry strategy treating healthcare equipment as a strategic national asset, and upgrading the Merseyside stockpile warehouse.
Why it matters: The £9.9bn write-off represents two-thirds of all PPE spending — a concrete loss to taxpayers — and the inquiry's explicit "no evidence" of corruption finding gives the government a defensible position despite the VIP lane criticism. Its call for a "radical overhaul" of emergency procurement now sits with the current government, which has pledged a formal response.
