UK Covid inquiry says PPE scramble wasted £9.9 billion

Ministers spent £14.9 billion on PPE during Covid. The UK Covid-19 Inquiry found that £9.9 billion of that was wasted after the UK entered the pandemic with stockpiles in a perilous condition and no proper emergency plan for buying or distributing vital equipment. The scramble left the government relying on the Army and private contractors to push supplies to more than 58,000 health and social care locations.

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry’s Module 5 report, published on 14 July 2026, examined how PPE, ventilators, oxygen and testing equipment were procured and distributed across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The country began the crisis with shortages, large quantities of expired stock and a system that was not built for emergency buying at national scale.

The report found the controversial High Priority Lane for politically referred suppliers damaged confidence in government procurement. The report includes findings on PPE Medpro, but that chapter was withheld under a restriction order and was not published on 14 July 2026. Baroness Heather Hallett’s inquiry said the pre-pandemic stockpile problem and absence of serious emergency planning forced ministers and officials into improvisation when the crisis hit.

In July 2022, the Public Accounts Committee said failures to control PPE contracts could cost taxpayers up to £2.7 billion, identified 176 disputed contracts worth as much as that amount and said the Department of Health and Social Care had spent more than £13 billion sourcing PPE while stock was spread across 70 locations in the UK and China. On 6 February 2020, more than 90% of the 929,600 FFP3 masks in the Welsh stockpile were out of date.

The British Medical Association said the pre-pandemic stockpile was too small, much of it was near expiry or deteriorating, and planning assumptions wrongly treated PPE as mainly a hospital issue for symptomatic patients. It said GPs and community staff were left underprotected, while women and ethnic minority doctors were sometimes forced to use ill-fitting PPE or work without proper protection. The Royal College of Nursing has separately warned that poor protection and weak guidance helped drive devastating outbreaks among staff.