AIBU to think governments should be able to do a lot better than waste £10 BILLION pounds on PPE?

[mumumental]

The Covid Enquiry has found that the then government (under Boris Johnson) wasted £10 billion on PPE, through flawed procurement practices.

in addition, the Inquiry chair criticised the government’s so called VIP lane, prioritising their own contacts and political connections.

The Tories should be ashamed of themselves. Them and Farage, of course, with his “gifts”.

How badly governed have we been over all the years, that this can happen? No wonder we’re short of money.

They changed the procurement process following this disaster. Sadly, the new procurement rules are totally counter productive, create significant extra work and therefore use resources that would be better used elsewhere, and are not at all adapted to the way the NHS contracts.

This is probably leading to more money being wasted that the problem itself in the first place!

I always wondered why the government pleaded ignorance of the companies in this country who could have helped with PPE and other things needed in the COVID Pandemic.
Surely the Inland Revenue/ Company's House have a database of who makes what ?
Surely this data could have been used to organise a coordinated response. ( Unless of course rumours of various ministers profiteering are true!)
Two examples from the time spring to mind.

1. ARCO, one of this countries biggest suppliers of safety equipment were never consulted, despite the chairman contacting Westminster to tell them they already had the required supply chains and quality control in place.
2. A textile mill in Lancashire held back material they were due to export to the USA for medical scrubs in case it was needed , only to be ignored by Westminster until they exposed this on local TV.

I'm sure there are other examples. What a sleazy bunch of charletons we had running the country!

It was a one off and a drop in the ocean compared to the debt interest payments of £111.2 billion a year we're currently dealing with.

The headline sounds terrible but you also have to take into account the situation the world was in at the time. There was a massive shortage of PPE. Governments everywhere were trying to buy any that was available. In those sort of emergency situations you cannot go through the usual procurement processes or by the time you do someone else will have bought it. When PPE came available our government, like I suspect many others, took risks to try and secure some.

Letting them convince (scare) us to lockdown cost far, far more and still is.

Utter financial mismanagement and probably a lot of mates backhanders , it’s sickening and at that level makes a huge difference to education or the NHS

Noses in the trough, plundering the country whilst people are scrabbling now to pay for food and housing and wait months or more for NHS treatment.

It’s disgusting and I really hope there’s a task force to chase the worst offenders (but no doubt it’ll all be covered up).

It’s not an either/or - both things can be true.

What a shambles!

At a guess the government can't buy anything without it costing them about a million quid more than it should be.

I think at the time there was a genuine "the end of the world is nigh" feeling of panic and the need to be seen to do something. All this not fit for purpose PPE was presumably not totally ineffective.

It just didn't meet NHS standards (and whether those standards are unnecessarily strict or not who knows!). My guess is that in a real crisis situation the stuff we bought would still have been better than nothing.

In hindsight because the pandemic was mild for most people (although fatal for some) we can see that our reaction with lockdowns, PPE buying etc was an overreaction and that the Swedish approach (and that of some US states) was much better.

But this is in hindsight and at the time no one really new if COVID would kill 1pc of people or 30pc.

The VIP lane was stupid though and was based on an assumption that MPs etc would vouch for supply chains etc. This turned out to be largely wrong.

It's worth pointing out that under the Civil Contingencies Act there are circumstances where govt ministers can assume direct semi dictatorial rule over the country. The sort of judgement making exhibited during COVID makes this quite worrying to me.