Misspent truth

Biggest UK spending scandal ever' Enough goggles to last 15 years

- BY MARK JEFFERIES Showbiz Editor and NICK SOMMERLAD Investigations Editor

DETAILS of how the Tories presided over one of the biggest government spending scandals of all time are to be revealed in a shocking new documentary.

Eye-watering waste running into many billions of pounds resulted from huge Covid contracts to provide mountains of personal protective equipment and medical tests.

One civil service whistleblower told ITV filmmakers: "I was disgusted at the amount of money that these companies were making. It was just ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching for them."

Some companies with little or no track record of supplying PPE including many introduced by ministers and key government figures via the high-priority "VIP lane"-landed massive deals.

One firm, linked to Baroness Michelle Mone, is being sued by the Department for Health for more than £120million for allegedly supplying unusable gowns. But the documentary names other previously unknown corporate winners.

Instead of buying four months of PPE stock as planned, within months the Government had stockpiled several years' worth - including enough goggles to last a decade and a half.

One million pallets of unwanted PPE ended up being incinerated in what Gavin Hayman, of the Open Contracting partnership, says represents "probably the biggest government misspending scandal in the UK of all time".

As the UK's expensive Covid-19 inquiry rumbles on largely unnoticed by the public, new ITV documentary Exposures asks how we went from having almost no PPE to having more than we could possibly have used.

The Mirror has previously revealed how thousands of ventilators, bought for £50,000 each during the pandemic, were sold off for as little as £100 via online auctions last year.