Government fraud investigators looking into Covid PPE contracts, MPs told

Government fraud authorities are looking into contracts to provide billions of pounds worth of PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic, officials have said.

Jonathan Marron, director general for the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities within the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) told the Commons Public Accounts Committee that there were “concerns” over 176 contracts. These range from the quality of the equipment provided to the performance of the contractor, the committee was told.

“We are working really, really closely with our internal fraud teams and the broader fraud authorities. That is part of what we are looking at, as to how we might bring resolution to these disputes. All options are on the table,” Mr Marron said. The amount of equipment at issue is worth £2.7 billion, as part of contracts worth £3.9 billion.

Also speaking to the committee, the DHSC permanent secretary Sir Chris Wormald said the level of suspected fraud was no higher than with other government contracts.

“It is not unusual to be in dispute on some contracts. Some of them will be resolved entirely amicably, some of them will get to the other end of the spectrum where we believe there has been wrongdoing,” he said.

“Fraud in contracting is a fact of life, regardless of the circumstances. It would be astonishing if this was the only large set of government contracts in which there was no fraud at all.

“What we haven’t seen is this set of contracts being more susceptible to fraud than the average.”

Officials also admitted that of the 33 billion items in the PPE stockpile which had to be reviewed, there are 1.3 billion items of PPE which are yet to go through quality control checks Mr Marron told MPs that this could take “months” to complete and he could not give not give an exact time frame for when this would be finished. He also noted that the government had received an additional 4.5 billion items since January which will need to be checked.

Concerning the items that will have to be disposed of, Mr Marron told the committee that the government has contracted two waste companies to look into recycling the items, with a second option involving burning the items for fuel. He could not confirm how many items would either be recycled or burned.

Mr Marron acknowledged that 1.1 billion items of PPE supplied during the pandemic, worth £461 million, had been identified as unfit for any use. But that represented “quite a small proportion” of the 19.8 billion items used to the end of last month.

When asked whether the government was “behind the curve” in its initial response and procurement of PPE during the onset of the pandemic, Mr Wormald defended the government. “With the benefits of hindsight you would do lots of different things, could you have looked at the evidence and made a decision slightly earlier? Well, possibly,” he said. ”Personally, having looked at it several times, I think the course of events that I set out was a rational set of decisions.”

The government has faced criticism over the companies given “VIP” treatment for Covid contracts, by being placed in a “fast lane” for procurement In a report last month the National Audit Office found more than half of the 51 VIP lane suppliers had provided some PPE which the government had deemed not suitable for frontline services.

When asked by MPs whether the government would use a VIP lane process again, Mr Wormald said no.