Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic
PPE storage costing £6.7m a week - civil servant
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-57424534
Elsewhere at the House of Commons, the chief civil servant of the Department of Health, Sir Chris Wormald, has been appearing before the Commons Public Accounts Committee.
As part of its inquiry - "Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic", the permanent secretary outlined the costs of the protective equipment.
He told MPs the cost of storing PPE supplies is running at £6.7m a week*.
Sir Chris said: "We have bought approximately £32bn items of PPE during the pandemic at a cost of approximately £15bn. Of those, 11.7 billion items have been distributed to the frontline so far, 12.6 billion are held in the UK as central stock, and 8.4 billion is not yet in the UK, it's on order from other parts of the world."
Referring to the 12.6 billion currently being stored in the UK, he said on today's numbers "it's costing us approximately £6.7m a week to store".
He said storage costs had fallen since January this year, but it remained a "large cost".
* £384 million a year .....
So, from no PPE we've now got too much .....