Recommendation 23

When we examined the Department’s 2021–22 Annual Report and Accounts, we found that it had written off £14.9 billion of public money as a result of overpaying and over ordering significant volumes of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), COVID-19 medicines and vaccines. We noted that the Department was paying large amounts of money to store the equipment, but would never use a significant proportion of the PPE it had purchased.42 The Department is undergoing a programme to dispose of, primarily by incineration, nearly all of its remaining PPE stock as it will not be used by the NHS. The Department procured £13.6 billion of PPE as part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but has reduced its value by £9.9 billion since 2020–21 in its accounts. This write off of over 70% of the value followed the Department’s assessments of market price changes (when prices returned to normal levels following the surge in prices during the pandemic) and whether the stock was unusable or held in excess amounts that could never be used.43