Labour has been making much hay out of the government’s £8.7 billion spend on personal protective equipment (PPE), much of it bought at the height of the Covid pandemic. The shadow Treasury minister Pat McFadden claimed the figure would be ‘galling to hard-working households’ while his colleagues have made much of the government’s VIP lane to secure kit that was in desperately short supply throughout much of 2020 and 2021.
Mr S abhors waste as much as the next man. But it’s worth asking as to what Labour’s own alternatives would have been if they were running the country when millions of items were suddenly required for frontline NHS staff.
Indeed, it’s worth looking at how Parliament itself operated throughout this period when it came to procuring face masks for its staff and MPs, Labour and Tory alike. For despite Parliament being either virtual or a ghost town for much of this period, the House of Commons spent some £51,000 throughout the past two years. A quick bit of number-crunching shows this could purchase some 647,247 Straame 3 ply disposable face masks at the full price of £7,89 a box.
Alternatively, if purchased when the same masks were at their maximum historic price of £24.79 in July 2020, this would have purchased 206,058 masks. Around 2,500 people employed on a permanent contract work on the parliamentary estate – the equivalent of between 82 and 258 masks per person.
Elliot Keck, TPA investigations campaigns manager, told Mr S:
Profligate pandemic spending didn’t just happen on Whitehall, but in Parliament too. Taxpayers who had to foot the bill for their own face masks will ask why House authorities purchased potentially hundreds of thousands of them. As we emerge from the pandemic, Parliament must end this practice and explain its spendthrift stockpiling of these masks.
Time for MPs to face up to the truth on PPE spending, perhaps?
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