Government bins £1.4bn of unused PPE | LBC analysis
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- Опубліковано 26 чер 2024
- £1.4bn-worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) bought by the UK government in a single deal has been destroyed or written off, marking a significant instance of waste during the Covid pandemic.
The data revealed that 1.57 billion items supplied by Full Support Healthcare will never be used. This was part of a £1.78bn contract made in April 2020, during the peak of the pandemic, to provide masks, aprons, eye protectors, and respirators. This deal was the government's largest PPE order, representing 13% of its total PPE expenditure.
Of the 2.02 billion items from the deal, only 232 million were distributed to the NHS or other care settings. Approximately 749 million items have already been destroyed, and another 825 million are set to be disposed of or recycled.
Tom Swarbrick is joined by Peter Smith, a former government procurement advisor, to analyse the significance of this story.
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#TomSwarbrick #PPE #News #UK #Politics #Government #LBC
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I’ll raise you £37 billion for the failed Test and Trace. That’s our money and we want it back.
Especially when we were offered other proven systems for nowt.
It was £25B for the entire test and trace programme. Most of which was spent on actually testing people.
@@mattheweagles5123 Really? Post a link for the news item that references your assertion.
Test and trace covered the UK and aĺl overseas territories and every country in the world bought PPE that was unusable
@@thomasswift3563 test and trace was the program that did the testing of people for COVID and tracing people who might also have caught COVID from those people. Buying PPE was wholly separate
Michelle Mone should be stripped of her peerage and jailed.
The Tories have very little to say about Tory Baroness Mone
If you still don't see that corruption is endemic in our ruling class then you're beyond help.
I don't see that corruption is endemic in our ruling class. It's certainly endemic in the Tory party - no argument there. Do you think the Tories are our "ruling class"? I don't.
@@tommymorrison6478 I would encourage you to watch The Labour Files and read the Forde Report. It'll leave you in no doubt that Labour are equally as corrupt.
@@tommymorrison6478They do..😊
@@tommymorrison6478well tbf as the party of choice for the wealthy they pretty much are. But that’s capitalism for you 😬
@@tommymorrison6478 The ruling class just happen to flock towards the Tory Party. They also tend to like donating to them. Coincidence perhaps. 🤷♀️
We only jail innocent sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses in the UK.
Birmingham Six , Guilford Four ect ect ect
criminals get given 100 million of our money to make it happen by an unelected criminal with connections to fijitsu.a rishi sunek.
Are you suggesting that people who buy too much medical equipment should be jailed?
@@mattheweagles5123 There's buying too much medical equipment and then there's deliberately buying too much medical equipment. One is a mistake - the other is embezzlement.
It’s called CORRUPTION
Agree
Do you have any evidence of corruption or are you just baiting libel lawyers?
I'd say the biggest waste of our hard earned cash was £37 BILLION on a test and trace app, that can be written and debugged in a day. Some folks got very rich, very quickly for next to nothing.
Where is Harding?
Can put money on it that sunak's wife's company got the largest piece of that pie...
And the job of main man/woman given to a failure.
2:41 That 37billion really needs to be investigated......it only cost France 500€ million using Google and it worked perfectly. The Tories refused any help from Google.
@@grateberk6435She can't be traced. 😊
They are ripping it right out of us and still people continue to Vote Tory totally insane
Where is Dido Harding? She was given the annual budget of a small country for a non-existant track and trace project. £37billion. I want her in jail and my money back.
Let’s not forget they put the UK poster child for losing personal information in charge.
Sleeping in her silken sheets.
She's spent it !
Oh I forgot no one could spend that ,she just likes looking at it, makes sense really, take 37 billion out of the economy all together so she can look at it
Johnson wasted 1Billion pound when he was Mayor of London
Forget the Tories, Let’s hound Angela Rayner for £1500 that’s she doesn’t owe.
I find it sickening that more air time is used to hound her about her living arrangements 15 years ago, than whether or not this PPE was stored properly. The expert interviewee was just spouting theories on why it could have / would have / should have. What is the answer, find that out, then we can have a radio debate about it.
Multi millionaire Angela Raynor. She's worth £3 million.
@@limpethead where do you find that figure? According to the BBC, her salary is £86k with £16k extra income...
She does owe it morally , you know that and I know that , no difference between Rayner and the Tories , what is an irrefutable fact in my life time or 70 years is that every single labour government has broken the economy , so expect more of the same ...........personally i'll be better off but my kids and my grandchildren will suffer because of it
@@limpethead Even if what you say is true- was it from corrupt tenders like PPE? Didn't think so
Criminal charges should be brought against the majority of the Conservative Party for their part in this scandal.
None of these scandals "make my blood boil" because after 14 years of this, I expect nothing else from the criminal gang that is the Tory party. I just want them out, and I want someone put in their place who genuinely wants to make the country work and isn't solely out to line their own pockets.
The PPE money is ALSO included in the NHS spend figures! Think about that every time Sunak says ‘record spending on the NHS…
And you know what else is coming out of the NHS budget? The compensation for the contaminated blood disaster.
As a disabled person who feels ostracized and vilified this really cuts deeply
Swarbrick was an advisor to Theresa May when her government was censured by the UN for its appaling treatment of the disabled. The call is coming from inside the house!
The biggest waste of our money 💰 was 14 years of Tory MPs wages and expenses, for.......... Sod All😢
It wasn't for Sod All. We got unusable PPE instead of usable PPE which cost lives. Much much worse than Sod All.
Don't forget their pensions. 🙄
300 000 dead due to 'austerity'.
Think about the duck house! A necessary parliamentary expense, obviously..
And we ended up paying at the store for masks as well. They could have been given out for free instead of being burnt.
corruption, corruption, corruption.
Who profited? And what was their relationship to the government? That's when an issue of waste turns to a matter of corruption.
Spot on
That's a job for a "super" majority Labour government to investigate.
Full Support Healthcare Ltd profited. They said that at the start. You can go look up runs it and also what they have donated to politicians or parties. No need to wonder when you can find out for yourself
I work in the NHS. Some of the facemasks had three revised sell by date stickers over the original printed one spanning 12 years. The whiff of corruption is overpowering
Insane.. 😢
Remember sunak said there was no case to answer on PPE procurement and cancelled the juridical review….corrupt to the core
The NHS had a procurment method but the Tories ditched it in favour of lining the pockets of their friends.
Fact
True but NHS procurement has always been a total mess. 30 years ago my wife worked for the NHS and I worked in IT. Her hospital needed a small computer network to run an analysis program and their kitchen ordering system. I offered to supply the system they needed consisting of 2 PC’s and some network bits and pieces. I could do it for £4000. At that time the PC was the modern standard desktop. The hospital procurement department went for a £30,000 system consisting of 2 Apricot computers that were incompatible with anything else and that were already being discontinued. Go figure!
On top of the £37bn T&T
£25b for the programme. Most was spent on testing.
@@mattheweagles5123 🤣
@@dekmackie I know, it's funny how misinformed some people are
@@mattheweagles5123 yes you are
On top of the £37bn T&T?
Rule (1) Tories are corrupt !! Rule (2) Never forget Rule (1) !!!
CRIMINALS
Solution: every government has to produce an itemised bill of every penny of public money spent and where it went to, these thing should not be a secret.
In a 2010 TED talk before he was elected, Cameron said "In this country, if we win the election, we are going to make all government spending over 25,000 pounds
transparent and available online, searchable for anyone to see. We're going to make every contract -- we're announcing this today -- available on the Internet so anyone can see what the terms are, what the conditions are, driving huge value for money, but also huge increases, I believe, in well-being as well." (time ref: 07:30-08:20 in the transcript)
@@megannehover4013 Well that was just the first of the Tory Mega Lies. Started as they meant to go on, didn't they?
@megannehover4013 and u believed him😂😂
Yes, we need an army of pen pushers following every penny, that's the way save money. But wait, how do we handle all those that think (say) the NHS already have too many pen pushers and not enough nurses. Or maybe we ask Horizon to do the leg work ....with that nice Gareth Jenkins in charge, or even Baroness Bra.
@@noelfleming3567 No, I didn't believe him. I compared what he said with what he did..
Come on, the PPE scandal is far worse and it should still be in the headlines, day after day.
Absolutely abhorrent. Let's hope it's decade's before the Tories geta sniff of power again.
£1.4 Billion ... lets just think about that figure for a minute or two ...
Baroness. 😂😂😂😂
This is why I encourage everyone I speak to, not to pay taxes or avoid taxes as much as possible... it just goes to these corrupt politicians... 😊I'd rather keep it if it ain't being spent on public services.
The money hasn’t ‘gone up in smoke’ at all! It’s gone into offshore accounts.
It wasn't waste. It was theft.
Why couldn't the NHS Procurement do their own ordering?????? That would have saved billions
Wernt allowed new companies set up to deal with d crisis some firms that supplied d NHS weren't even asked for a quote 😢
It's about cronyism not about the waste or about panic buying , why did they give the buddies the contracts instead of the NHS or the normal route who said that they could do it 😢 still getting lies
Giving the NHS a contract to supply equipment to the NHS?
I hope Starmer has plans to order a police investigation into all corruption.
What is this bs about we didn't know where to get ppe and it hard to find. Actual Ppe companies that made the real deal mask came forward and said to the government how much do u need we are here to deliver but the government ignored them and gave the contract to their friends who had no experience in making ppe
Any one involved and found to be corrupt , they should be prosecuted and taken to crown court and if guilty , they should have proper prison sentence,s.
But it's d people running d country doing d fiddling so u can figure it out
Its okay only tax payers money
😡🤬😡
@@frankieelen7238 I was being sarcastic.
That's exactly how they look at it they can't lose
Why no jail why no justice for tax payers. I do not include the rich or big companies in tax payers.
is this why Tom allwayss defends the Tories
Swarbrick left LBC in August 2016 to join the Senior broadcast team at Downing Street as Head of Broadcast.[7] He was an adviser to then Prime Minister Theresa May during the election of Donald Trump as US president, the triggering of Article 50 and subsequent Brexit negotiations, and the 2017 general election.[8] He left the role in March 2018.
Yes.
Exactly.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Wow realy??didn't know that 🤷♂️
In fairness to him, May was certainly the least corrupt of all recent Tory leaders. Unfortunately she was out of touch, among other issues
Billions of pounds is incomprehensible, unimaginable. Everyone can understand a betting shop; most people have had a flutter on the Grand National. We can all see that skiving off from D-Day is shameful.
What about the pub landlord that got a COVID contract or Dido Hardings Track and Trace ..
You missed the L out🤣🤣
@@robh8814 not sure what you mean by L
@@keithdonnelly8636 Put the l in Harding's first name🤣. Surprised you didnt get it.
@@robh8814 sorry just eaten and tired 😴
Covid waste is inexcusable, it’s an insult to the general public. How do you think people who are unable to feed their families feel. I waste very little. It’s easy when it’s not your money! These people need to try to manage on an average salary! How dare they do dare behave like this!
When they got their noses in d trough they kept slurping
And still people will vote for Tories next week. Scary how short the memory is
Blood money
i mean, it has a life span. There's nothing else you can do with it. The question should be why was so much over-bought (corruption, tory mates etc). The scrapping is immaterial and needs to be done.
The company itself has done nothing wrong here - they were asked (perhaps by a corrupt politician) to provide X amount of material for £Y cost and they've fulfilled that request without any issues. I'm sure they jumped at the chance - any company would, to make £1.5 billion profit in a year.
WHY were they asked to do this? Which MP organised this? How do they know the owners? Do they have shares in the company (or their friends/family etc)? and so on.
You're forgetting what the Johnson governement was like, every week he would stand up and say 15 billion here 7 billion there 2 billion over there, it was never about weather or not the PPE was usable or not it was how well BJohnson could sell the idea the government was doing anything about it.
Something which needs to be borne in mind is that the Tories decided not to replenish the national emergency equipment reserve after its was used as part of the Swine Flu outbreak and ebola outbreaks. Had this reserve had been available the Government would have had time to follow procurement rules and certainly avoided this level of waste of usable kit and avoided the amounts of usuable and frankly unfit supplies.
There was also Dodgy Dave the only difference is people wasn't paying attention compared to how they are now engaged since the Referendum
The question should be why did we not have enough PPE, given that a pandemic was No1 on the UK risk register.
There needs to be prison sentences from this and every penny and a fine of double of what was stolen implemented.
The PPE scandal is way more important. How many nurses or GP appointments could have have funded? Absolute incompetence and corruption. Labour need to root this out and ensure suitable sanctions are applied including jail time.
Same goes for the PO scandal too
I'm sure Starmer has said that he plans to set up a 'Covid Corruption Commission', to try to get our money back
All the waste written off v Benefit fraud / cuts. Do the Maths! Or the consequences for people's lives?
Consultants are the biggest con in existence
It takes your breath away….
It’s all a scandal and it all needs to be addressed 🤬
They get away with it all the time its a Joke
1p or £100million, corruption is corruption full stop. No ifs, no buts.
👍👏👏👏
LBC trying to excuse the Tories.
What is being forgotten in this discussion is the failure of government to provide ppe to social care. That councils were pleading with government to let them manage local logistics because they knew how to do it - not civil servants or consultants.
In a 2010 TED talk before he was elected, Cameron said, "In this country, if we win the election, we are going to make all government spending over 25,000 pounds transparent and available online, searchable for anyone to see. We're going to make every contract -- we're announcing this today -- available on the Internet so anyone can see what the terms are, what the conditions are, driving huge value for money, but also huge increases, I believe, in well-being as well." (time ref: 07:30-08:20 in the transcript)
Sick of getting angry at the scale of corruption. Nothing will happen to those who committed fraud at a level never seen before, so what's the point.
there needs to be a full investigation of all the covid wasted spend... and Mone needs to be in jail
Also wrote off billions in fraud and they acted fast to ignore companies with experience and use mates instead.
£1.4bn is just 13% of the total spend....the NAO estimated that between £33bn to £58bn was lost through fraud or error!!! Yet nothing nothing....what sad docile people we've turned into.
Can they go just one day without a scandal or crime LOL
But but but...the SNP spent £11 of their own cash on stamps
I think bookies care about this quite a lot. Granted that many others won't care much.
Are we to be told that medical staff were wearing bin bags because all the functioning equipment was already out of date at the time? Even imagine if it was, were bin bags really the better choice?
And talking of wastage, please don't ever forget Dido Harding's 27bn of 32bn Test-and-Trace fiasco!!!!
37 billion track and trace? Sunak and boris should repay it.long prison Sentences for fraud.
Its something that doesnt suprise me. This is why you dont allow the government to manage things like this.
Swarbrick is a propaganda genius, notice how he started with the outrage of gamblegate and then pivoted to PPE...using an example of an actual PPE supplier who made a killing during covid when the public outrage is about the fast lane setupto help friends And family get contracts...like Mone
And his feed that he says has mostly messages of how gamblegate doesn't matter, is not the same as mine.
If he ever has to look after his OWN KIDS AGAIN like he had too do during Covid then its Game Over. That's the Wife's Job. Lets not forget that Tom was a Special Advisor in the May Gvt of 2017 so he's true Tory Spin. Cant Stand Ferrari but at least he's never worked in the Con Gvt, he just gives them a an easy ride & does all their Publicity for them. Still never seen Christopher Biggins & Ferrari in the same room together..
Knocks me sick.
I think a large part of it must be that the suppliers to government are able to inflate their costs simply because the government *has* to have the supplies.
I thought the point was that the equipment was NOT to the right standard.
I think this LBC interview and the BBC article lack a sense of the scale of the situation.
How did the UK govt manage to "panic" buy such a high percentage of their PPE from friends and family, to companies that were less than 60 days old, to companies that were worth much less than their contracts?
I think this LBC interview seems to lack information of whether this deal was flagged or should have been flagged by the civil service based on existing regulations.
If this is a story of a MP or chief civil servant overruling concerns of offering a 25-person company a £1.78bn deal, no new regulation would solve this. Only kicking out the corrupt MP ...
Why is this not given to all the care homes free of charge?
How do we measure up to other economies, when it comes to this blatant waste and corruption?
When this story first came out why did the reporters have evidence that it was actually substandard and unusable?
This a clear case of the irrational belief that a government should be run like a business.
Press talks about £100 bets and ignores £1.4bn waste and corruption - while being told 'we need to raise taxes'. Pretty much says it all
The first thing these Tories and their mates thought was how can we make money out of this
While people died these people were dreaming about how much money they could make
❤❤❤
It's called Disaster Capitalism.
With all the excess PPE lying around in some storage somewhere, we were bullied and reported to supervisors for even as much as asking to use correct and appropriate PPE in my hospital!😢
As a frontline health care worker who worked through covid (in Canada), this is unbelievable... 😢
And they moved their company to another jurisdiction to avoid scrutiny of their accounts.....
That is half the money to scrap the 2 child cap. We could of bought 100s of thousands of children out of poverty with that money. What a waste.
*Nodody thinks its wierd that just before covid the FDA director left and got a special partnership position on Pfizers board, or that his replacement also then left to work for Moderna?*
_Think._
Wake up, sheeple!
Don't let them spin it in their favour 😮
In retrospect, there was social panic and media, panic and overordering. Therefore someone should be accountable for making that order and sign in the chat.😊
and now the increased taxation we are paying is spent on the sovereign debt interest rather than going towards better services.
Please can some upcoming investigative journalist find out if/how Tory MPs were connected to the company concerned. Thank you in advance.
It’s called having A POOR MORAL COMPASS.
!!!
Didn't the company move their finances to Jersey after getting the order, so hiding their profit?
Why don't we ask who calculated it to be 30 billion, the government constantly claimed the pandemic would be over much quicker than it was yet they bought double that. Maybe as someone with a ehole GCSE in maths I must be a rere bread in government but nothing how much is needed is adding and mutiplying it is beyond simple.
I worked for an NHS Trust as a governor during COVID. As they couldn't get PPE for their staff the Chief Exec and her PA went onto Amazon and spent an absolute fortune , of what should have been money used to treat patients, on Amazon to ensure that the staff were protected. I am sure that many, if not all, Trusts did the same. And how much of that was unusable and how much was wasted is anyone's guess. And yet all of this government funded PPE was available and not distributed. So the cost is far higher than just government money
10:48 this is a huge problem with companies as well. Ironically this idea of dropping budgets like this came from the private sector, because executives are idiots, just looking at any random 10 companies shows that.
It's not so much the act of putting the bet on it's the lack of critical thinking about the ethics of it that concerns me.
to support what Peter Smith was saying about how corruption is more prevalent these days, what I've started doing is counting the number of days between every political scandal. I don't think I've made it to 5 days in a while
Peter Smith's shameless advertising of his own book.
That's not corruption.
It's not a 'flutter' if they had insider knowledge, it's theft.
They waste this money on their mates, then scapegoat the disabled and ill people, over their disgusting error.
If you make something and it's not fit for purpose you're allowed to get your money back so why aren't the public getting their money back
I would not be surprised if a friend of a friend from someone in government happened to be connected with one or more companies involved in a nice little earner..