These two CUN.TS:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cll476qzm85o
About £1.4bn worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) has been destroyed or written off in what is understood to be the most wasteful government deal of the pandemic.
Figures obtained by the BBC reveal that at least 1.57 billion items of PPE provided by the NHS supplier, Full Support Healthcare, will never be used, despite being manufactured to the proper standard.
Any profits since the contract was fulfilled are not known because in 2021 the co-directors, Sarah Stoute, 50, and her husband Richard, 53, based the business offshore in Jersey for privacy reasons.
The figure includes some 749 million items that have already been burned or destroyed, “including by energy from waste”, and a further 825 million that are classified as excess stock “where disposal and recycling are possible outcomes”.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said the money lost "could have been used to pay the salaries of 37,000 nurses".
"We all know that billions of pounds was wasted during the pandemic on corruption and incompetence, but what the BBC has uncovered is the worst example I have ever seen - £1.4bn on one contract, paying for PPE that was never used.
"It is staggering waste and I think we need a full and frank account as to how so much public money was thrown down the toilet," he said.
Under an existing arrangement with the NHS, their company won two DHSC purchase orders, including one for £1.78bn, for face masks and other items.
Speaking at the time, external, Mrs Stoute said volumes of their product, shipped from China, increased from “eight sea freight containers every month to 800”.
In a post on X, then known as Twitter, in October 2020 she wrote that her “team of 25 people” supplied “one fifth of the PPE national stockpile”.
She added:
“I’ve paid a few people’s mortgages off this last few weeks.”
Afterwards,
Mrs Stoute and her husband bought a £30m seafront villa in Barbados; a yacht; a £6m house in the south of England and an international equestrian centre in Bedfordshire.
