Recommendation 16

The Cabinet Office acknowledged that it was taken by surprise by the need for a massive quantity of protective equipment, and by the difficulty of sourcing it from reliable UK-based suppliers.36 It said that a particular challenge was supplying PPE to care homes, hospices and community care organisations. While NHS systems are designed to deal with supplying the 226 NHS trusts, delivering to the social care sector “added enormously” to the logistical challenge.37 The Cabinet Office acknowledged that it had more work to do to in planning for the future to ensure it had identified manufacturers who could quickly produce PPE and undertook in future to build up bigger stocks than it had done in the past to prepare for high-impact, low probability events.38 When challenged on why it did not have the foresight in January and February 2020 to know that the UK would need to step up production of PPE and ventilators, the Cabinet Office claimed that the full effects of the crisis were not at all visible in January and only became so in the latter part of February and March.39 The government did not publish its national plan to secure PPE until 10 April.40 At the start of the outbreak, the only central stockpile – held by Public Health England – was designed for a flu pandemic. It lacked items such as gowns and visors, which an independent committee advising the Department on stockpile contents had recommended in 2019.41 The Department of Health & Social Care has previously told us that it buys the vast majority of its PPE on international markets and will continue to do so.42 Issues have been reported with some shipments from abroad.