In Defence of Dodgy PPE Contracts
Would you pay £1,000 for a bottle of water? Unless you’re completely off your rocker then I assume you’d say no. Of course you wouldn't. You can get water relatively cheaply from the taps in your home and it probably won’t make you sick. Regardless, you can always pop to the shops and buy a bottle of the stuff for far less than a grand. However, if you found yourself stranded in the desert and about to die of thirst then I reckon you would pay that much for a bottle of water. Even if it was clearly rancid. Even if you didn’t know or trust the mysterious stranger who suddenly appeared to sell you the water. You’d probably be prepared to pay even more than £1,000 for it.
I mention this because it’s been reported that the UK government ‘lost’ £1.4 billion on a PPE contract with Full Support Healthcare during the pandemic. The government bought the PPE, it was up to scratch (unlike many of the PPE it procured), but most of it wasn’t used. It has now degraded and so it has been destroyed.
There has been a lot of anger over this and in the government’s PPE contracts in general. It is one of those issues that has managed to unite the left and the right in their outrage with both Wes Streeting and the Taxpayers’ Alliance condemning this and holding this up as an example of an incompetent and profligate government. I actually quite like Wes Streeting and I’m cautiously optimistic that he can reform the NHS. I also like the TPA and I worked for them for over two years. However, both the TPA and Streeting are wrong on this.
It is obviously right that the government is careful in how it spends taxpayers’ money and if there are instances of cronyism or corruption then they should be investigated by the relevant authorities. However, the government was absolutely right to go on a splurge to procure PPE during the pandemic.
I started working for the government at the height of the pandemic. It was May 2020 and the UK was in the middle of the first lockdown. I had returned home to Huddersfield and so was working from my old bedroom. The room had been redecorated to match the tastes of my nieces who often stayed there and so had pictures of butterflies and Disney princesses on the wall. It was from there that I attended Teams calls with Liz Truss and other ministers and officials at the Department for International Trade. We used to have daily meetings at 08:30 where we would discuss what everyone was working on and receive updates. A fixture of these meetings was an update from the junior minister, Ranil Jayawardena. He would gleefully inform us of how many items of PPE had been procured the previous day and from where.
Some people might be tempted to mock this given that some of the PPE was indeed not fit for purpose and we did spend a lot of money to get it. This is to completely miss the point and to forget that we were in the middle of a pandemic and also sort on PPE. The government was absolutely right to spend whatever it had to in order to procure PPE. This is true even if it was from dodgy sources and if it turned out not to be fir for purpose. This was the action of a responsible government.
In more normal times then of course the government shouldn’t splurge taxpayers’ money. However, in the middle of a pandemic this was absolutely the right thing to do. Hopefully we won’t find ourselves in the same situation ever again but if we do then I hope that the government would do the exact same thing. It would be incredibly reckless of them to do otherwise.
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