LONDON (Labour Buzz) - Are you bored? Got room in your bedroom? No nothing about PPE or importing, but willing to give it a shot? If so, congratulations, you could be in line for a lucrative government contract worth millions.
That’s what happened to a Scottish property developer who found himself twiddling his thumbs thanks to a slowdown in his business as a result of COVID 19. Ross Harper, Director of Robert Housely Ltd, decided to get involved with PPE procurement despite admittedly knowing nothing about PPE before getting started.
His company has no website, and is registered to a serviced office complex in Glasgow and had never secured a government contract before. Nevertheless, when the government saw his proposal they thought ‘that’s the guy for us’. They bunged him almost £10million in a contract which they awarded “without a prior publication of a call for competition” thanks to the “extreme urgency” brought about by the pandemic.
Ironically, this is one of the success stories of the Government’s PPE saga in that the gowns actually worked. However, even he found himself surprised when the government collected the gowns from the Chinese factory themselves despite him pricing them assuming he’d be paying for shipping.
“We created [the gowns], about 100,000 or 120,000 a week, and they actually collected them in China which was great because we had priced them as if we were bringing them back to the UK so we were able to save.”
In other words, the government paid the costs of shipping and then shipped them themselves.
Other stories are even worse. There’s the landlord of Matt Hancock’s local pub who secured contract producing medical vials after dropping a message to Hancock on WhatsApp. Previously, his only experience with importing involved plastic cups.
He denies that he profited from a personal relationship with Hancock although he has since admitted he exchanged several text messages and emails with Hancock and knew the Health Secretary well.
The pub is just a short walk from Hancock’s former constituency home and he was said to be a keen supporter of the pub. A picture of the two pulling a pint behind the bar appeared on Hancock’s parliamentary website.
From here it’s a bit of a donkey ride of awful. £252 million went to Ayanda Capital for 50 million unusable face masks. The company, which describes itself as a ‘family office investment firm’, failed to notice the masks had ear loops instead of the required head loops which meant NHS staff couldn’t secure them to their faces.
A damning report from the National Audit Office found that the government had spent an excess £10bn on PPE during the pandemic thanks to its failure to hold sufficient levels of PPE before the pandemic. The study also criticised the parallel supply chain designed to expedite the supply of PPE and found that it still hadn’t received much of the equipment it had ordered.
The NAO also found that suppliers with government contracts were given the red carpet treatment down a ‘high priority’ channel which meant they were automatically treated as credible.
According to the report, 500 suppliers with connections to government figures were given priority status, meaning bids were ten times more likely to succeed if they came from people with friends in high places.
Worse still, much of that equipment was faulty. As Starmer highlighted in a stormy PMQs, the government’s response to that report only dug them into a deeper hole when they admitted they had bought 184million pieces of PPE which we were not fit for purpose.
The UK has spent more on PPE than any other country with the vast majority of contracts being awarded without the usual competitive tender process. The official excuse given is the need to move as quickly as possible given the urgent nature of the pandemic.
However, the process is incredibly wasteful and has, in many cases, hindered rather than accelerated the process of accelerating supply, as goods were found to be faulty or sent to the wrong location.
It meant that firms with no experience of PPE were pushed to the front of the queue while others who were ready to go found themselves pushed to the sidelines. Labour has repeatedly highlighted instances of offers being ignored.
These include ISSA Exchange Ltd in Birmingham which offered a quarter of a million aprons and masks, Network Medical Products in Ripon which said it could provide 100,000 face masks per week and CQM Learning which offered 8,000 shields per day.
Pharmaceutical wholesaler Veenak International Ltd, which is based in Coventry, ended up shipping millions of pieces of PPE overseas after the government ignored their offers of help. They were not alone as millions of pounds worth of PPE made its way out of Britain after calls to the government fell on deaf ears.
Calls for change
The corrupt and incompetent mishandling of the PPE fiasco means this pandemic has been a bonanza for some while those on the front line have been left high and dry. Yesterday, just as they were digesting the image of a former Conservative Councillor Steve Dechan using the proceeds of his £276 million PPE contracts to buy himself a mansion in the country, front line workers were given the news that their pay would be frozen.
Dechan’s firm, Platform 14, received two contracts worth £120 million and £156 million during the pandemic, neither of which went through a competitive tender. It was a welcome boom for the company which had been struggling for the past five years. Since receiving the contracts, he said, he had been taking a salary of £500,000 per year while his wife took home £150,000, part of which was backpay. He’d been taking a meagre £25,000 from the company during its years of struggle.
Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, has condemned the contrast between the way that people who had put their health on the line to fight the pandemic were being asked to tighten their belts and the ‘bonanza for those who have won contracts from the government… This waste and mismanagement is part of a longer-term pattern.’
The government have of course rejected the criticisms with Johnson flying in the face of logic and credibility by claiming he was ‘proud’ of his record on PPE, which is a bit like returning home to find your dog is ‘proud’ of the mess it has made on your carpet.
It is, though, as Dodds pointed out, part of a pattern in which people who have been working night and day to see the country through the pandemic have been left high and dry by a government which has lavished its friends which cash.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)