UK’S PPE COSTS AROUND £6.7m A WEEK, SAYS HEALTH ADVISER
Sir Chris Wormald, Permanent Secretary to the Department of Health and Social Care, told MPs that it currently costs around £6.7 million PER WEEK to store the UK’s stock of personal protective equipment (PPE).
“The current situation – we have bought approximately 32 billion items of PPE during the pandemic, to a cost of approximately £15 billion,” he told the Commons Public Accounts Committee.
“Of those, 11.7 billion items have been distributed to the front line so far, 12.6 billion are held in the UK as central stock, and 8.4 billion is not yet in the UK, it’s on order from other parts of the world.
“I think today’s number, and of course these numbers go up and down, it’s costing us approximately £6.7 million a week to store our central stock of PPE.
“Now that has been falling quite fast, the equivalent number for January 21 was £11.6 million, so we’ve been making some considerable efficiencies on storage, but it remains a large cost.”
