What the £15bn spend on PPE tells us about the mess we’re in

The £15 billion spent on PPE, personal protective equipment, since March is one of those numbers that once it’s in your head, it’s impossible to unthink it, like a ghoul from a nightmare. It gauges both the scale of the health and economic crisis we’re enduring, but also quite how astonishingly unprepared the government really was.

Remember at the beginning the Health Secretary Matt Hancock said we had more than adequate stocks of PPE because of no-deal planning. Just for the record, the £15bn dispensed on face masks, gowns and visors – which have a user life of anything from a day to a few weeks – would, on the government’s sums, be enough to pay for at least 18 new hospitals. Which is not to argue, of course, that Matt Hancock should have scrimped on the PPE – although for the government to spend quite that much, but still have healthcare workers complaining they were unprotected is quite an achievement (and will be a focus of the totemic public enquiry, as and when).