PPE for health service that cost taxpayer £1k sold on for £5
- Published
Items of PPE were sold online for £5
A box of personal protective equipment (PPE) that cost the taxpayer more than £1,000 during the first wave of the pandemic has been sold on for just £5.
BBC NI's Spotlight programme tracked down the online sale while investigating what happened to more than £100m of gear bought by the NHS from a Northern Ireland sweets company.
Clandeboye Agencies Ltd stepped forward when supplies of PPE were running out.
The Health Department in England signed £107.5m of contracts with the company.
Clandeboye Agencies said it delivered what was ordered and that its pricing was competitive and lower than the average price per gown.
The Health Department said proper due diligence was carried out for all government contracts
Antrim-based Clandeboye Agencies is a wholesale seller of sweets and nuts to shops.
Its directors also run a hardware company that sells protective equipment for the construction industry.
From May to July 2020, Clandeboye Agencies had millions of items known as thumb-looped gowns or aprons shipped from a factory in Cambodia to an NHS warehouse in England.
Spotlight has investigated what happened next.
BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight programme investigated where PPE bought from the company went
Months later boxes from the same shipments have not been used by the NHS and some have been sold on the open market for much less than they cost the taxpayer.
A QC who is challenging the contracts in court said the government had refused to tell him how the shipments were used by the NHS.
"Government has to tell us what happened, because otherwise we can't know," Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, said.
"So we've asked government an awful lot of questions about where the gowns ended up.
''And government has basically refused to tell us."
Spotlight found boxes selling online for between £5 and £125 - the cheapest one sold by an auction house based in Stockport in March.
The buyer got 250 items for £5, which is slightly more than the £4.20 the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) paid per single item less than a year earlier.
Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner told Spotlight: "It's a devastating indictment of what the government were up to and unfortunately it's not just one off occurrence.
''We've seen that billions of pounds have been wasted."
The company had millions of items of PPE shipped to an NHS warehouse in England
Clandeboye Agencies told Spotlight it delivered what was ordered and that no concerns had been raised with it about the gowns it supplied.
The company stated that its pricing was competitive, and lower than the average price per gown - less than half the cost of the most expensive gowns which were offered to government.
A Department for Health and Social Care spokesperson said: "We have worked tirelessly to source life-saving PPE, delivering more than 15.7 billion items to protect frontline health and care staff.
"Proper due diligence is carried out for all government contracts," the spokesperson added.
Spotlight is on Tuesday, 22:35, on BBC One Northern Ireland and iPlayer