>For sale: 64,000 pairs of protective goggles. Unwanted purchase. £250 opening bid. Must have own lorry for collection from Skegness.PPE bought for hundreds of thousands of pounds is being auctioned by the government for a fraction of its cost on an auction site.In an attempt to offload billions of items of unwanted PPE and cut storage fees that are running at £7 million a month, ministers are holding a fire sale of items they hope will recoup some money for the taxpayer.Officials insist the auctions are the best alternative to burning unwanted PPE to avoid having to pay storage costs.But with bidding ending on Tuesday, there has been little interest in an auction of more than three million items on the Ramco website, a corporate auction platform. The total cost to taxpayers of the PPE on sale has been estimated at about £600,000 but it has so far attracted bids totalling only £2,500.
>
>A 24-pallet lot of goggles has a bid of £260, and 187,200 aprons are under offer for £250.Potential buyers must be willing to pick up the PPE from Skegness in Lincolnshire and other places between April 18 and 22 and are warned: “The storage location can load an articulated curtain side truck. No other vehicles will be accepted without authority prior to collection.”The National Audit Office found last month that almost half the PPE bought in the pandemic had been used and 14.2 billion items were languishing in storage. One in ten items bought by the government were unsuitable for NHS use and the government has had to write off £8.7 billion because of falls in the stock’s value.Ramco has been awarded a contract worth £123,000 for PPE disposal and the Department of Health says it is “piloting opening the sale of excess PPE stock to the market” to “reduce the costs to the taxpayer in storing excess stock”.Labour has criticised the waste of taxpayers’ money. The government has previously insisted that it deliberately erred on the side of saving lives by making sure the NHS would not run out: “Having too much PPE was preferable to having too little in the face of an unpredictable and dangerous virus, given this was essential to keep our NHS open and protect as many people as possible.”
From Link.
Throw the government a bone thetimes.co.uk and put a link to the auction site.
surely it would be better to give it away for free than to burn it, if storage really is costing so much… hell maybe donate it to third world countries, surely they’d find it useful, it just seems like such a criminal waste ><
They paid over double for it, and failed to both check the credentials of those they offered contracts to and chase up the subsequent fraud. Calling it a fiasco underplays how diabolical the PPE scheme actually was.
That’s nothing. We massively overordered on vaccines and paid 10x the price anyone else did. All for a couple of weeks lead over the rest of Europe.
5 comments
>For sale: 64,000 pairs of protective goggles. Unwanted purchase. £250 opening bid. Must have own lorry for collection from Skegness.PPE bought for hundreds of thousands of pounds is being auctioned by the government for a fraction of its cost on an auction site.In an attempt to offload billions of items of unwanted PPE and cut storage fees that are running at £7 million a month, ministers are holding a fire sale of items they hope will recoup some money for the taxpayer.Officials insist the auctions are the best alternative to burning unwanted PPE to avoid having to pay storage costs.But with bidding ending on Tuesday, there has been little interest in an auction of more than three million items on the Ramco website, a corporate auction platform. The total cost to taxpayers of the PPE on sale has been estimated at about £600,000 but it has so far attracted bids totalling only £2,500.
>
>A 24-pallet lot of goggles has a bid of £260, and 187,200 aprons are under offer for £250.Potential buyers must be willing to pick up the PPE from Skegness in Lincolnshire and other places between April 18 and 22 and are warned: “The storage location can load an articulated curtain side truck. No other vehicles will be accepted without authority prior to collection.”The National Audit Office found last month that almost half the PPE bought in the pandemic had been used and 14.2 billion items were languishing in storage. One in ten items bought by the government were unsuitable for NHS use and the government has had to write off £8.7 billion because of falls in the stock’s value.Ramco has been awarded a contract worth £123,000 for PPE disposal and the Department of Health says it is “piloting opening the sale of excess PPE stock to the market” to “reduce the costs to the taxpayer in storing excess stock”.Labour has criticised the waste of taxpayers’ money. The government has previously insisted that it deliberately erred on the side of saving lives by making sure the NHS would not run out: “Having too much PPE was preferable to having too little in the face of an unpredictable and dangerous virus, given this was essential to keep our NHS open and protect as many people as possible.”
From Link.
Throw the government a bone thetimes.co.uk and put a link to the auction site.
surely it would be better to give it away for free than to burn it, if storage really is costing so much… hell maybe donate it to third world countries, surely they’d find it useful, it just seems like such a criminal waste ><
They paid over double for it, and failed to both check the credentials of those they offered contracts to and chase up the subsequent fraud. Calling it a fiasco underplays how diabolical the PPE scheme actually was.
That’s nothing. We massively overordered on vaccines and paid 10x the price anyone else did. All for a couple of weeks lead over the rest of Europe.