Recommendation 11

The Department acknowledges that it still has many PPE contracts that have ongoing contractual issues that need resolving. There are 176 contracts where there are concerns about either the quality or the performance of the contract and these are collectively worth £3.9 billion.27 The Department has assessed that of that £3.9 billion, contractual issues mean that £2.7 billion of taxpayer money is still at risk of not achieving value for money.28 However, it told us that it is not unusual for disputes to arise on contracts like these and that looking across the wider health service and the NHS many contractual disputes are “resolved entirely amicably” whilst at the other end of the spectrum some will have involved an element of wrongdoing.29