A cavernous £11m warehouse stocked with £5m of medical products and food has been set up on a business park in south Wales in readiness for a no-deal Brexit.
The Labour-led Welsh government said the money it had spent buying the warehouse could have bought seven MRI scanners for the NHS in Wales.
Members of the media were allowed into the warehouse as the government warned that a no-deal Brexit posed significant risks to health services in Wales.
The warehouse is stocked floor to ceiling with medical products such as syringes, needles, dressings and tubes. There are pallets of tinned food, flour, sugar, tea and coffee.
Mark Roscrow, the programme director for the NHS Wales shared services partnership, said the warehouse contained two months’ worth of stock to ensure that health and social services continued to run smoothly if a no-deal Brexit caused disruption.
He said: “It gives us an additional eight weeks of stock on top of what we normally hold. It gives us additional insurance against delays.”
The location of the warehouse cannot be revealed for security reasons but it is in south-east Wales, not far from major routes that will allow the goods to be dispatched to any part of the country.
Roscrow said there were 1,000 product lines and 40 employees on the site. He said many of the products came from Europe, such as syringes from Belgium and incontinence products from northern Europe.
Many of the products also come through Europe from the far east and the worry is that delays in Dover could lead to shortages in hospitals and clinics hundreds of miles away in Wales. “It is a challenge but we are trying to build resilience into the system,” he said. “At the moment we’re just not sure what the impact will be.”
Vaughan Gething, the minister for health and social services in Wales, said no amount of planning could guarantee a disruption-free Brexit.
Speaking in the assembly, he said: “My position remains crystal clear: a no-deal Brexit poses significant risks to services in Wales and the public that they serve.”
The warehouse does not hold medicines, which are being stockpiled on a UK basis. But Gething said: “In addition to medicines, there are hundreds of thousands of products that the NHS relies upon each day. These include everything from dressings and bandages to gloves, syringes, needles and much more.”
The minister also flagged up the number of staff involved in planning for a no-deal Brexit. “Our estimate is that there are the equivalent of between 50 and 100 full-time posts dedicated to no-deal readiness across health and care in Wales – enough to run a significant number of medium-sized general practices in Wales instead.”
Gething was accused of scaremongering by the Tories, but he said: “We’ll continue to do all that we can to prevent the UK government from leading us to a disastrous no-deal Brexit, which will inevitably hit Wales harder than other parts of the UK.”
