I don’t understand why the manufacturers are being focused on at all in this article. They delivered what they were contracted to deliver. If there’s any fault it’s the fact that the PPE isn’t being used or sold to somebody who can use it or just being maintained in the stockpile for the future

There should absolutely be an enquiry over the contracts awarded for PPE during the pandemic. It seems to me that some companies with no history of, or experience in, supplying medical gear won multi-million-pound contracts. I’d like to know the basis on which those contracts were awarded.

Why would you not just… use it? You have hospitals, they use this stuff. Reduce how much they’ll need to buy in the near future by dumping a few crates of whatever in their loading bays.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was responsible for purchasing and delivering Covid PPE, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.The Labour Party described the contract as a “staggering waste” while the Liberal Democrats said it was a “colossal misuse of public funds”.

Full Support Healthcare agreed a £1.78bn deal in April 2020 to deliver face masks, respirators, eye protection and aprons - the largest Covid PPE order from a single supplier, accounting for 13% of the government’s total spend.Before the pandemic, the company, which was already a specialist manufacturer of PPE, had 25 employees and annual profits of £800,000, external.Any profits since the contract was fulfilled are not known because in 2021 the co-directors, Sarah Stoute, 50, and her husband Richard, 53, based the business offshore in Jersey for privacy reasons.They and the company continue to pay all UK tax.

“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”.

Sarah Stoute, a former nurse, set up Full Support Healthcare in 2001 in Wellingborough and her husband became a director three years later.As experienced providers of PPE during previous pandemics, they moved quickly to boost supply as Coronavirus took hold in late 2019.Under an existing arrangement with the NHS, their company won two DHSC purchase orders, including one for £1.78bn, for face masks and other items.Speaking at the time, external, Mrs Stoute said volumes of their product, shipped from China, increased from “eight sea freight containers every month to 800”.In a post on X, then known as Twitter, in October 2020 she wrote that her “team of 25 people” supplied “one fifth of the PPE national stockpile”.She added: “I’ve paid a few people’s mortgages off this last few weeks.”Afterwards, Mrs Stoute and her husband bought a £30m seafront villa in Barbados; a yacht; a £6m house in the south of England and an international equestrian centre in Bedfordshire.Giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee in 2021, she said they “risked everything as a company and went into mass production with no security at all”.

Lawyers representing the Stoutes said: “Full Support Healthcare stock arrived quickly by summer 2020, much earlier than most and in larger quantities.“It had either a two- or three-year shelf life.

Full Support was in no way responsible for the stockpile.The company’s lawyers said the Stoutes were only made aware of the volume of unused stock when the BBC told them.They said it was a matter for the government who had not contacted them at any stage about it.Four years since the first national lockdown in England and Wales, the DHSC continues to store and dispose of billions of items of excess PPE at a cost of millions of pounds a week.

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