Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 17
Sixty-Sixth Report - PPE Medpro: awarding of contracts during the pandemic
Published 18 Jul 2023
Public Accounts Committee All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
The Committee has raised problems with PPE procurement regularly since July 2020, problems which are illustrated by the example of the PPE Medpro contracts. We reported early on in the pandemic that there were fundamental flaws in central procurement and local distribution of PPE.7 We highlighted that the need to operate at speed was not a justification for rushing into contracts without adequate due diligence or regard for public money8 and that the approach adopted had opened up significant procurement risks. We found that the Department had already wasted hundreds of millions of pounds on poor quality and unusable PPE by the time of our February 2021 report on PPE and that the High Priority Lane had not been effective in sorting good from bad offers or identifying credible leads.9
From: Public Accounts Committee, Sixty-Sixth Report - PPE Medpro: awarding of contracts during the pandemic (HC 1590), 18 July 2023
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 24 September 2023.