One civil service whistleblower told ITV filmmakers he was “disgusted” by amount of profits some companies made
Details of how the Tories presided over one of the biggest government spending scandals of all time are to be revealed in a shocking new documentary.
Eye-watering waste running into many billions of pounds resulted from huge Covid contracts for mountains of personal protective equipment and medical tests.
One civil service whistleblower told ITV filmmakers: “I was disgusted at the amount of money that these companies were making. It was just ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching for them.”
Some companies with little or no track record in supplying PPE landed massive contracts, including many introduced by ministers and key government figures via the high-priority VIP lane.
One firm, linked to Baroness Michelle Mone, is being sued by the Department for Health for more than £120 million for allegedly supplying unusable gowns. But the documentary names other previously unknown corporate winners.
Instead of buying four months of PPE stock as planned, within months of lockdown the government stockpiled years’ worth – including enough goggles to last 15 years.
One million pallets of unwanted PPE ended up being incinerated in what Gavin Hayman, of the Open Contracting partnership, says represents “probably the biggest government misspending scandal in the UK of all time”.
As the UK’s expensive Covid-19 inquiry rumbles on largely unnoticed by the public, new ITV documentary Exposures asks how we went from having almost no PPE to having more than we could possibly use.
The Mirror has previously revealed how thousands of ventilators bought for £50,000 each during the pandemic were sold off for as little as £100 via online auctions last year.
We also exposed how the NHS flogged 6,000 unused Nightingale hospital beds it had bought for £13million for just £410,000 as they were not suitable for hospitals. When the country went into lockdown in March 2020, the UK’s hospitals were woefully lacking in supplies of PPE.
Boris Johnson set up a new procurement unit run by Matt Hancock ’s Department of Health, with many of its staff coming from Michael Gove ’s Cabinet Office. The government put out public appeals to help source PPE from new suppliers, and the normal tender and competition rules were suspended.
Under pressure to respond quickly, a secret VIP lane was also set up by civil servants to deal with credible offers coming via ministers, MPs or senior officials.
According to the documentary, this is when things started to go wrong. A whistleblower who was working in the department at the time was exasperated that companies with a background in supplying PPE were being sidelined in favour of VIPs.
The source tells the programme: “It was very frustrating because you’ve done a lot of the background work, taking the time to find out about the companies, see who their manufacturer was, so that we could check the manufacturer had the capability of producing as many items as they said, and then to find out none of your deals have gone through.
“The VIP lane was obviously the Premiership, and all the rest of the suppliers were in the second division.” Mr Gove and Mr Hancock say the VIP lane was created by officials to effectively prioritise significant offers, that ministers were not involved in decisions to award contracts and just forwarded promising leads to civil servants. They say their priority at the time was to “save lives and protect the NHS”.
The ITV film shows how two previously unnamed Covid-testing companies, Tanner Pharma and Nationwide Pathology, both made huge profits thanks to their contracts.
Nationwide made £40million over the pandemic, while Tanner was given testing contracts totalling £1.4bn after it contacted a Department of Health official.
Tanner went from a pre-pandemic loss off £678,000 to a cumulative profit over the pandemic of £193m. Its American owner, Banks Bourne, paid himself a £148m dividend, courtesy of the British taxpayer.
Another company called Innova appeared from nowhere in March 2020. It was set up by Charles Huang, who rain a private equity firm in California.
Innova got its contract after it reached out to Dominic Cummings, who was Boris Johnson’s advisor at the time. By the end of the pandemic, Innova had been paid over £5bn by the UK government despite having no track record in supplying medical goods.
By contrast, Arco is a leading UK supplier of PPE with over 50 years’ experience. It sent 750,000 PPE kits to Sierra Leone during the ebola epidemic. But when Covid arrived, nobody was returning their calls.
Arco chairman Thomas Martin tells Exposure: “We used the government portals, we used all of our existing contacts. There would be 50 or 60 attempts every day to break through, and we were coming up against the closed door. I couldn’t understand why anyone in charge would choose to ignore the expertise on tap.
“The safety industry was not mobilised.” In all, the UK spent around £15bn on PPE. The whistleblower adds: “We had so much, but we were still buying when we didn’t need any more. We weren’t able to warehouse it, and it was getting left at docks.”
By March 2022, the UK had 300 pieces of unused PPE for every person in the country. Companies that were hired to supply PPE were now being rewarded again to store it. Much of it ended up incinerated. The whistleblower concludes: “We were wasting so much money.”
Tanner Pharma said: “Tanner Pharma was selected to provide lateral flow tests because they were determined by UKHSA to have high specificity and sensitivity. We were not referred to the high-priority lane and delivered over 480m reliable, accurate testing kits.”
Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Michelle Mone and Nationwide Pathology all declined to comment.
* The Covid Contracts: Follow the Money is on Sunday night on ITV at 10.15pm.
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