Recommendation 14

The Cabinet Office’s ventilator challenge, which encouraged UK businesses to develop new ventilators from scratch and increase the production of existing products or modified designs, was undoubtedly a significant achievement. In total, it produced around 15,000 mechanical ventilators in the space of just four months, over 1.5 times the number available to the NHS at the start of the pandemic. The Cabinet Office estimated it would normally take a decade to produce this amount and described it as a “terrific response” from British industry and designers.23