A box of personal protective equipment (PPE) which was sold to the NHS by a Northern Ireland sweets wholesaler and cost the taxpayer more than £1,000 during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, has been sold on the open market for just a fiver.
he BBC NI Spotlight programme tracked down the online sale while investigating what happened to PPE worth £107.5m, which was sold to the Department of Health and Social Care in Whitehall by Antrim-based confectionery company Clandeboye Agencies.
There is no suggestion of wrong-doing by the company. However, Labour said the sale was an “damning indictment” of how the government behaved in the early days of the pandemic.
Clandeboye Agencies, it was reported, responded to a call to action by the government as it had contacts in the far east and a sister company which had also sold protective equipment for the construction industry.
Earlier this year, Clandeboye was named in the High Court as being part of a “VIP lane” for firms with political connections seeking contracts, but the UK Government claimed the sweets manufacturer was not part of the reported 47-firm VIP list.
Between May and July last year, Clandeboye, which is registered at Companies House as dealing in “wholesale of sugar, chocolate and sugar confectionery”, shipped millions of items to an NHS warehouse in England.
However, their final destination was not known.
Barrister Jolyon Maugham QC is the director of the Good Law Project, a legal campaign group that first identified the existence of a VIP lane.
They are taking legal action over UK Government Covid contracts, and together with fellow campaign organisation EveryDoctor are challenging the Department of Health and Social Care in London over the lawfulness of the VIP lane and large contracts awarded to Clandeboye Agencies and two other firms.
Mr Maugham claimed the government had refused to say how the shipments were used by the NHS.
The BBC investigation revealed some of the items were not used by the NHS but sold on at much less a value than what the taxpayer had handed over.
Some boxes were sold online for between £5 and £125, the cheapest one at just a fiver, sold by an auction house based in Stockport last March.
The buyer got 250 items for their fiver, only slightly more than the £4.20 that the taxpayer paid for a single item less than a year earlier, the BBC reported.
The Labour party’s deputy leader Angela Rayner said the discovery was “a devastating indictment of what the government were up to”.
“Unfortunately, it’s not a one-off occurrence – we’ve seen that billions of pounds have been wasted,” she added.
The Belfast Telegraph approached Clandeboye and the Department of Health in London for comment.
Clandeboye told Spotlight that it delivered what was ordered and no concerns have been raised with them about the PPE.
The company stated that its pricing was competitive and lower than the average price per gown, which is less than half the cost of the most expensive gowns which were offered to the government.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care in Whitehall told the programme: “We have worked tirelessly to source life-saving PPE, delivering more than 15.7 billion items to protect frontline health and care staff.”
The Spotlight episode will air on BBC One NI, Tuesday night at 10.35pm.
