Desperate nurses resorted to wearing bin bags and shower caps during the Covid pandemic because the government failed to provide adequate protective equipment, the UK Covid inquiry has found. In a damning report published on Tuesday, chair Baroness Hallett revealed that almost £10bn of taxpayers’ money was wasted on personal protective equipment (PPE) that was never used or was out of date.
The waste – put at £9.9bn – represented two-thirds of the £14.9bn the government spent on PPE alone. When home testing kits, ventilators and other equipment were included, total spending between January 2020 and June 2022 exceeded £42bn, the inquiry found. The UK entered the pandemic with its emergency stockpile of masks, gowns and gloves in a “perilous state”, Baroness Hallett said, and was unprepared for the global race to secure supplies.
“Nurses wore bin bags as £9.9bn of PPE was wasted, Covid inquiry finds”
Only a third of the masks in England’s pandemic stockpile were usable, while Scotland had no supplies of high-grade respiratory masks used in hospitals. Care homes, GP surgeries and pharmacies were expected to source their own PPE – a “major failure in planning”, the report said. The “ventilator challenge” programme, which asked suppliers to develop breathing equipment at short notice, led to a further £143m charge for designs that never entered production.
Baroness Hallett criticised the controversial VIP lane that prioritised PPE offers from suppliers with political connections, describing it as a “misguided policy” that should not be repeated. However, she said there was “no evidence of cronyism or corruption” by ministers or other officials when awarding final contracts. One VIP lane deal with PPE Medpro, a firm linked to Tory peer Michelle Mone, was not mentioned due to ongoing legal proceedings.
The Royal College of Nursing said the fact staff were forced to hastily repurpose ordinary household items should be “marks of shame” for successive governments. The inquiry’s report concluded that “better planning would have resulted in fairer, faster and less costly procurement decisions”, noting that while it was better to have bought too much PPE than too little, “it would clearly have been better if supply had been calibrated more closely with demand”.
