In the past two years, the DHSC has written off £15bn of stock, including £10bn of PPE, £2.6bn of Covid medicine and £2bn of Covid vaccines…reports Asian Lite News
Britain’s lead public health body has a staggering lack of control over billions of pounds of spending, and there is no plan for stockpiling vaccines or personal protective equipment (PPE) for a future pandemic, a damning MPs’ report has found.
The public accounts committee was highly critical of the repeated governance and financial failings at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), which was set up with great fanfare under Boris Johnson.
Meg Hillier, the committee chair, said it would be “utterly inexcusable” for the government to have failed to make serious preparations for future health emergencies and warned the lack of a plan for stockpiling could leave health workers once again exposed to danger as they were in 2020.
The committee lambasted the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which oversees UKHSA, for lacking a strategy for reserves of PPE, vaccines and medicines despite its mandate to protect the country’s health security.
The MPs were particularly critical of the decision for it to be led by Prof Dame Jenny Harries, a former deputy chief medical officer for England, saying she was “appointed into a role, as accounting officer and chief executive, of which she had no previous experience”.
Opposition parties described the situation as an “utter shambles” and called on Steve Barclay, the health secretary, to explain to parliament what was being done to overhaul the organisation.
There are wider concerns about the unprecedented pressure on and vulnerability of the NHS, which marks its 75th anniversary on Wednesday. While waiting lists continue to rise, the health service is also facing strikes from junior doctors and consultants later this month.
Prof Philip Banfield, the leader of the British Medical Association, warned on Tuesday that most frontline medics believed ministers were seeking to “destroy the NHS” because they have starved it of cash and mistreated its staff.
UKHSA, launched by the then health secretary, Matt Hancock, in March 2021, had the aim of being a global leader in public health and dealing with threats from pandemics, outbreaks, vaccination programmes, weather-related health problems, the risk of nuclear harm, local health protection teams and mpox (formerly known as monkeypox).
However, the committee of MPs said it was established without a proper budget, lacking good governance and without even some of the most basic financial controls. About £3.3bn of stock could not be accounted for by UKHSA.
Hillier said it was “completely staggering that an organisation envisaged as a foundation stone of our collective security was established with a leadership hamstrung by a lack of formal governance, and financial controls so poor that billions of pounds in NHS test and trace inventory can no longer be properly accounted for”.
She added: “It is greatly alarming that there is no clear plan from the government for an emergency stockpile of vaccines, medicines and PPE. Three years after the start of the pandemic, the government still has no proper controls over the PPE stocks it already has.
“This could leave frontline workers exposed in the future to shortages similar to those faced in 2020. For the government not to make serious preparations for any future pandemic would be utterly inexcusable.”
In the past two years, the DHSC has written off £15bn of stock, including £10bn of PPE, £2.6bn of Covid medicine and £2bn of Covid vaccines.
The report said UKHSA had cut almost two-thirds of its staff in the two years as Covid funding was wound down, and its verdict was that it “was set up with financial controls so poor that it cannot be established whether its transactions were applied to the purposes laid out for it by parliament”.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said: “While Rishi Sunak was running the Treasury, he burned through £15bn of unusable PPE that is now literally going up in smoke. Under Sunak’s watch, billions of pounds of public money is unaccounted for. The Conservatives have treated taxpayers’ money with utter carelessness. They have failed to learn the lessons of the pandemic and are repeating the same mistakes again.”