A written parliamentary answer has revealed that £2.7 billion worth of PPE will be wasted as they are no longer needed or cannot safeguard NHS staff.

Health Minister Edward Argar was responding to a question tabled by Wendy Chamberlain, the Liberal Democrats’ chief whip and MP for North East Fife, about how much of the PPE that had been procured had then not been used.

The large sum of money involved has prompted the Liberal Democrats to accuse the government of ‘extreme negligence on an industrial scale’ in its use of public funds during the pandemic.

Argar said that the government’s PPE programme had ordered more than 36.4 billion items since the pandemic struck in March 2020. Of this, he answered that approximately 3.4 billion units are currently identified as potential excess stock. The estimated price for those items is £2.2 billion.

He also said that 6.96 billion items of the 36.4 billion ordered so far ‘are not currently provided to frontline services’. That could be because it was new stock that had not yet been through quality assurance checks or not deployed because ‘a different product is preferred’. He added that, of these, 1.2 billion items are deemed to be not fit for use. The purchase price for these items was £458 million.

Chamberlain said: “Awarding contracts to chums unlawfully, frontline workers wearing bin bags and dodgy masks, and billions wasted – this is merely the latest sorry chapter in this Conservative government’s inglorious record of procuring and supplying PPE to health and care workers who have worked so hard, with a dangerous virus circulating in hospitals and care homes, to give people care over the last two years.”