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Image caption: Large quantities of full support healthcare PPE discovered in the New Forest last year Article information Author: John Ironmonger Role: BBC Investigative Service, Northamptonshire 25 June 2024, 06:36 BST
Updated 1 hour ago
Around £1.4bn worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) has been destroyed or written off in what are described as the most wasteful government measures of the pandemic.
Figures obtained by the BBC reveal that at least 1.57 billion pieces of PPE provided by Northamptonshire-based NHS supplier Full Support Healthcare are never used, despite being manufactured to the right standard.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was responsible for purchasing and delivering personal protective equipment to combat COVID-19, said it was unable to make a statement due to the pre-election period.
Labour described the deal as an “astonishing waste” and the Liberal Democrats said it was a “colossal misuse of public funds”.
Full Support Healthcare agreed a £1.78 billion contract in April 2020 to supply face masks, respirators, eye protection and aprons. This is the largest Covid-19 PPE order from a single supplier and accounts 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.
It is unclear what the profit will be once the deal is fulfilled because co-directors Sarah Stout, 50, and her husband Richard, 53, offshored the business to Jersey in 2021 for privacy reasons.
They and the company will continue to pay full UK tax. Neither Full Support Healthcare nor the Stouts have committed any wrongdoing.
Image source: Full Support Healthcare
Image caption: Sarah Stout worked as a nurse before founding Full Support Healthcare.
The BBC's Investigative Unit made a series of Freedom of Information requests over a six month period to NHS supply chains, which manage the delivery of medical products.
Responses revealed that of the 2.02 billion pieces of PPE provided by Full Support, only 232 million have been shipped to the NHS and other care facilities.
Around 749 million have already been incinerated or destroyed, “including through energy from waste,” and a further 825 million are classified as surplus stock “resulting in potential disposal or recycling.”
This means around £1.4 billion worth of Full Support Healthcare's PPE will go unused.
The contract is arguably the most wasteful of the pandemic: Only one other contract was more expensive, and that was awarded to a variety of suppliers providing a range of services, according to data compiled by data firm Tassel.
The government had previously estimated that £85 million worth of PPE secured under contracts was going unused, representing around 6% of the actual total.
We have called on the DHSC to explain this disparity and why so much PPE was not used.
The BBC understands that at least an additional £100 million of public money has been spent storing and incinerating the surplus stock since the purchase.
Image caption: Full Support Healthcare has supplied PPE to the NHS during various past pandemics.
'Astonishing waste'
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said the lost funds “could have been used to pay the salaries of 37,000 nurses”.
“We all know billions of pounds have been wasted on corruption and incompetence during the pandemic, but what the BBC has revealed is the worst example I have ever seen – £1.4bn paid for a single contract, for PPE that was never used.”
“This is an astonishing waste and I think we need a full and honest explanation of how so much public money has been wasted,” he said.
The BBC contacted the DHSC and the Conservative Party several times to explain the findings and ask a number of questions, but has not received a response.
“We acted quickly to procure PPE at the height of the pandemic while competing in a overheated global market where demand significantly outstripped supply,” the government said in an earlier statement.
The Liberal Democratic Party said it would “take measures to ensure that such misuse of huge amounts of public funds never happens again.”
Initial projections for how much PPE was needed were “a huge target of tens of billions of units, far exceeding the actual amount,” according to Peter Smith, a former government procurement adviser and author.
“I think procurement people did what a lot of us would do, which is they panicked a little bit to get supplies, or at least signed contracts and hoped things would arrive later, as if price didn’t matter.
“That meant opportunists and middlemen from completely unrelated industries were able to make exorbitant profits by arranging supplies from places like China, sometimes literally doubling the purchase price,” he said.
Image caption: Stockpiles of medical aprons were considered a fire hazard
Former nurse Sarah Stout founded Full Support Healthcare in Wellingborough in 2001 and her husband became director three years later.
The company has experience supplying PPE during past pandemics and acted quickly to ramp up supplies when the coronavirus outbreak hit in late 2019.
The company has been awarded two DHSC purchasing orders worth £1.78 billion for face masks and other items under existing arrangements with the NHS.
At the time, Mrs Stout said the amount of product being shipped from China had increased “from eight ocean freight containers to 800 each month”.
In an October 2020 post on X, then known as Twitter, she wrote that her “team of 25 people” had supplied “one-fifth of the national stockpile of PPE.”
She added: “We've paid off a few people's mortgages in the last few weeks.”
Mrs Stout and her husband have since bought a £30 million seaside villa in Barbados, a yacht, a £6 million house in the south of England and an international equestrian centre in Bedfordshire.
“We risked everything as a company and went into mass production with no guarantees,” she said in evidence to the Public Accounts Committee in 2021.
There is no evidence that the Stouts or their companies did anything wrong.
Image caption: The Stout family bases their business in Jersey for privacy reasons.
“Repeated obstruction of reporting”
“Full Support Healthcare's inventory arrived in large quantities by the summer of 2020, significantly earlier than most inventories,” an attorney representing the Stout family said.
“The shelf life was two or three years, which means there's a good chance the PPE products have expired.”
On the issue of the couple relocating their business overseas, their lawyers said: “The choice to base the group companies in Jersey was solely to protect the privacy of our clients and their families, particularly in light of the frequent media intrusions.”
The couple and their companies remain registered in the UK for tax purposes.
The Stouts unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit against News Group Newspapers in 2023 after the Sun on Sunday published photos of them on a beach in Barbados.
The judge ruled that the couple, who were photographed riding jet skis from a boat to a nearby restaurant, did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Image caption: The discarded Full Support PPE was purchased from the government by a third-party private company.
Documents seen by the BBC in April showed around 1,550 pallets of waste at the farm near Culmore, Hampshire, was deemed a fire risk.
The government sold the pallets to a third-party private company as part of its process to auction off surplus PPE.
Full Support does not assume any responsibility for stockpiling.
The company's lawyers said the Stouts only found out about the amount of unused stock when they heard about it from the BBC.
They maintained that this was a government matter and they had not received any communication from the government at any stage.
Four years after the first national lockdown was imposed in England and Wales, the DHSC continues to store and dispose of billions of pieces of surplus PPE, at a cost of millions of pounds each week.
Do you have a similar story to share with John? Contact him confidentially at jon.ironmonger@bbc.co.uk
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