‘Staggering' 300 Million PPE Items Set To Go To Waste

A vast stockpile of protective equipment worth £303m has expired (AFP/Getty)

- Samuel Lovett

More than 300 million items of PPE in the government’s national stockpile cannot be used by frontline health workers because they have passed their expiry date, The Independent can reveal.

There have been calls for an inquiry into the waste as figures from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) show that masks, gloves, aprons and other items worth £303m have expired.

Some of the supplies went out of date in March 2020, while “a very small quantity” had already expired years before the beginning of the pandemic, according to data obtained by a Freedom of Information request.

Britain has an excess supply of personal protective equipment, and critics believe that surplus items should have been donated to countries in need, rather than being hoarded and allowed to expire.

“An inquiry needs to be held into why such crucial public health assets have been allowed to go to waste,” said former prime minister Gordon Brown, who has campaigned against rich countries buying up vaccine and medical supplies.

Labour’s Nick Thomas-Symonds, the shadow secretary of state for international trade, said it was “staggering” that the government had wasted £300m’s worth of PPE.

“At the start of this pandemic hospitals, care homes and GPs were all struggling to acquire the PPE and now 20 months later we are seeing hundreds of thousands of items wasted,” he said. “Ministers should have known when the PPE was going to expire. This is shocking incompetence – people with genuine need of PPE could have been provided with it and were not.”