Will taxpayers get the £122m paid for useless hospital gowns?

The five-year unravelling of Britain's most high-profile Covid contracts scandal involving a baroness, her husband and multimillion-pound government deals accelerated last week with a high court judgment against the company linked to the former Tory peer Michelle Mone.

- David Conn

The judge, Mrs Justice Cockerill, ruled that PPE Medpro, owned by Mone's husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, had supplied defective personal protective equipment (PPE) for NHS use in the pandemic. Cockerill ordered that PPE Medpro must return the sum of £122m, which the Department of Health and Social Care paid for the order of 25m sterile surgical gowns, under a contract awarded in June 2020 via the "VIP lane".

The judgment was hailed by Rachel Reeves, as vindication for the Labour government's stated determination to recover some of the billions of pounds in public money wasted during the pandemic by Boris Johnson's administration. “We want our money back. We are getting our money back,” the chancellor posted on X. “And it will go where it belongs - in our schools, NHS and communities.”

The June contract, and another worth £80.8m to supply face masks, also paid for by the DHSC, were granted to PPE Medpro after Mone approached the then cabinet minister Michael Gove in May 2020. Her offer was processed via the “VIP lane”, the system operated by Johnson’s government, giving high priority to politically connected people such as Mone, and treating them as more credible even than experienced PPE suppliers.

For years afterwards, Mone and Barrowman through their former lawyers denied involvement in PPE Medpro, until in late 2023 they acknowledged their roles and Mone admitted they had lied.

The gowns were rejected on inspection in September 2020 at the NHS warehousing facilities in Daventry, Northamptonshire, because their labels were invalid, and signalled that they had not been certified to be sterile, a vital, life-protecting requirement. Cockerill ordered that the £122m be repaid by 15 October, this coming Wednesday.