Recommendation 8

The Department told us that it has now received nearly all of the 37.9 billion items of PPE which it ordered, with only 300 million items outstanding. It told us that whilst it has now opened every container it has received there are still 1.39 billion PPE items that have not been fully quality assured.16 The NAO reported that quality assurance checks have resulted in 11% of PPE items being deemed not suitable for front-line services, equivalent to 3.6 billion items at the time of reporting.17 The Department was unable to offer any definitive timescales on when it would complete its quality checks.18