Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said the money lost “could have been used to pay the salaries of 37,000 nurses”.
“We all know that billions of pounds was wasted during the pandemic on corruption and incompetence, but what the BBC has uncovered is the worst example I have ever seen – £1.4bn on one contract, paying for PPE that was never used.
“It is staggering waste and I think we need a full and frank account as to how so much public money was thrown down the toilet,” he said.
The BBC contacted the DHSC and the Conservative Party several times with no reply to set out our findings and ask a number of questions.
In an earlier statement the government said it had “acted swiftly to procure PPE at the height of the pandemic, competing in an overheated global market where demand massively outstripped supply”.
The Liberal Democrats said it would “take steps to ensure such a colossal misuse of public funds never happened again”.
According to Peter Smith, a former government procurement adviser and author, the initial forecasts for how much PPE was going to be needed, “were far higher than they should have been… with enormous targets of tens of billions of items”.
“I think the procurement people did what many of us would have done and slightly panicked to get the stuff in, or at least get the contracts in and hope the stuff arrived later – it was almost as though price didn’t matter.
“It meant opportunists and middlemen in entirely unrelated industries could make extortionate margins by organising supply from China or wherever, sometimes literally doubling their purchase price,” he said.
