Recommendation 15

The Department had not calculated the value of unusable or potentially unsuitable items but told us that it was currently undertaking work to estimate this and committed to coming back to us with a timetable for when this would be complete.24 It told us that it was investigating potential fraudulent activity and acknowledged that while the levels of fraud were very low, the costs could run to millions of pounds. It 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. The NAO reported the value of potentially unusable items will amount to hundreds of millions of pounds.25