National Audit Office -
According to this report, the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) continues to deal with the contract management issues caused by the need to purchase unprecedented volumes of PPE in 2020 due to Covid-19, with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money still at risk. It finds that since February 2020 DHSC and its NHS procurement partner, NHS Supply Chain Co-ordination Limited, have awarded almost 10,000 contracts for personal protective equipment (PPE). DHSC has so far spent £12.6 billion of the total £13.1 billion it expects to spend on almost 38 billion items of PPE. It also outlines how DHSC is continuing to assess potential fraud across the programmes and its current estimate is that this will be between 0.5 per cent and 5.0 per cent of expenditure.