Recommendation 7

The Department has wasted hundreds of millions of pounds on PPE which is of poor quality and cannot be used for the intended purpose. The urgent need for PPE meant it accepted more risks when buying PPE than it usually would. At the time of our evidence session, some 195 million items of PPE, equivalent to 10 COVID-19: Government procurement and supply of Personal Protective Equipment around 1% of those received to date, had been identified by the Department as being potentially unsuitable for their intended purpose. The Department hopes that some of this can be used for other purposes. It now estimates that only 0.4% of the PPE it has received failed to meet safety standards and therefore cannot be used at all and that 1.3% of items were not fit for the intended purpose. It has not yet estimated the amount of money that has been spent on potentially unusable items, but this will amount to hundreds of millions of pounds. The Department told us told us that its PPE contracts contain clauses which allow it to reclaim costs for substandard PPE or PPE that was not provided, but it could not tell us how many of these contracts it was pursuing or how much progress it had made. Recommendation: The Department should write to the Committee by July 2021 setting out how much of the PPE it ordered it has received and checked, and the volumes and costs of the PPE that (a) cannot be used at all; (b) cannot be used for its intended purpose; and (c) its methodology for determining the volumes and costs of PPE which it considers to be in each of these categories.