The Covid-19 Inquiry and PPE: What have we learned so far?

What were the key lessons to emerge from the latest instalment of the Covid-19 Inquiry in March, which scrutinised the government’s approach to sourcing personal protective equipment (PPE)? From poor-decision making and VIP lanes, to billions spent on unusable or overpriced products, it was clear that the UK’s emergency response systems abjectly failed to cope under pressure.

While the Inquiry has laid bare the challenges in distinguishing between good intent, opportunistic exploitation and deliberate wrongdoing, it has also made one thing clear: serious failures in process and judgement ran right through the UK’s pandemic response.

Lesson 1: The UK was woefully underprepared for a pandemic

Firstly, the systems and infrastructure that should have supported a rapid emergency response were simply not in place. The approach was described as “firefighting”¹ in the absence of strategy, with limited visibility of stock, overwhelmed procurement systems, and supply chains and stockpiles that quickly failed under pressure. 

Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock was assured that the UK was a global leader in pandemic preparedness² – a view that, in hindsight, reflected misplaced optimism and revealed just how untested, fragmented, and under-resourced the government’s actual systems were when crisis hit. 

That false assurance carried over directly to the government’s procurement appeals – well-meaning but destabilising calls to suppliers that swamped procurement units with “an avalanche of offers”³, jamming a system already vulnerable and again exposing unpreparedness at every level.

Lesson 2: The least efficient process possible was set up

A combination of earlier government appeals for PPE supply and Matt Hancock’s public ‘Call to Arms’ on April 10th 2020, inundated procurement officials with more than “24,000 offers from over 15,000 suppliers”⁴, many of whom were entirely unknown to the government. 

Sir Gareth Rhys Williams, the government’s then Chief Commercial Officer, told the Inquiry that these appeals “caused huge problems”⁵ and plunged a system already under pressure into total chaos.

Sir Gareth emphasised how procurement teams possessed neither the staff nor the facilities to absorb the surge in supplier bids: “substantial backlogs built up… we were not able to find enough people fast enough to be winning against the rate of inflow of new offers”⁶. In response, existing procurement staff from across departments were drafted in hastily, often with no background in the procurement of medical-standard products. 

Additionally, the PPE Cell, which had just been set up, was poorly prepared and under-resourced, improvising its way through the flood of offers. As the most senior Cabinet Office commercial representative in the PPE buy team at the time, Dr Chris Hall admitted bluntly, they “had designed the least efficient process possible.”⁷

Lesson 3: unscrupulous suppliers were able to profiteer with middlemen pushing up prices

The government’s limited knowledge and connections with reliable suppliers created space for “numerous intermediaries and [opportunistic] agents”⁸ to step in – often outpacing officials in reaching manufacturers, driving up prices, and opening the door to widespread profiteering. 

As one witness noted, “the more intermediaries in the supply chain, the higher the price.”⁹ This created an environment in which profiteering could flourish – a point highlighted by Chris Young, former co-director of finance in the Department of Health and Social Care, who noted one deal priced “900% [above] the benchmark”. 

To make matters worse, there were no robust checks on those awarded contracts. Offers were accepted at speed, often with minimal scrutiny, as officials scrambled to keep up with demand. With limited direct access to manufacturers and mounting urgency, procurement teams ended up “doing due diligence on [middlemen]”¹⁰ – many of whom brought no real value beyond adding cost. This not only lost time and money, but also led to inflated prices and profiteering by giving intermediaries free rein to dictate supply, access, and profit. 

The Public Accounts Committee later found that there had been “insufficient due diligence checks at the outset of the pandemic to prevent potential profiteering.”

With little time or ability to judge quality, contracts often ended up with companies that were ill-equipped to manufacture and deliver suitable products. Some suppliers were well-intentioned but lacked the relevant expertise; others were opportunists, seeking to make a quick buck in the chaos. And as supply tightened, the lack of coordination across government made things worse. 

Lesson 4: The UK ended up competing against itself and pushing up prices

From the onset of the pandemic, there was no central playbook for PPE procurement . Instead, various departments, task forces, and agencies ran parallel efforts to source vital supplies. Andy Wood, former deputy director and commercial specialist in the Complex Transactions Team, described how everyone was flying blind, with teams “competing with the China Buy Lane, the New Suppliers lane and, of course, the High Priority Lane.”¹¹ 

In some cases, teams were likely clashing with one another inside government: “whether it was us competing against the central Buy Cell, inadvertently with an NHS trust, a devolved administration talking to the same supplier, or, worst of all, between ourselves.”¹² The result? “We were pushing our own prices up.”¹³

Lesson 5: the VIP lane was set up as a way to handle ministerial pressure and “noise”

As Lord Feldman – former Adviser to the Department of Health and Social Care at the time – described, officials were “totally overwhelmed,”¹⁴ unable to sort credible from speculative offers. 

Ministers then felt pressure to intervene in an attempt to speed the process up. They began referring suppliers directly – intended as a way to triage the chaos and ensure frontline services received what they needed. 

As a result of the chaos, a new fast-track channel for offers referred by ministers was created – one that was designed to increase efficiency, but ultimately introduced new layers of risk.

With the procurement system buckling under pressure, the so-called ‘VIP lane’ – commonly referred to internally as the High Priority Lane (HPL) – opened the door to ministerial referrals chasing civil servants for updates. According to officials, the lane was largely motivated by growing political pressure to efficiently refer offers and not a conscious attempt to prioritise friends of ministers. As Sir Gareth Rhys Williams put it, “The HPL was set up deliberately to handle ministerial office requests”¹⁵ – as later accounts make clear.

Max Cairnduff, former director in the Complex Transactions Team, described how “three or four different ministers or MPs”¹⁶ might follow up on the same supplier,  leaving civil servants inundated with a stream of follow ups – with questions like, “…what’s happened to the thing we sent you three days ago?”¹⁷. 

As procurement expert Professor Sanchez-Graells put it: “…those chasing were not willing to take an automated response or a “Please wait and let me do my job” answer. They wanted to know specifically what was going on with the specific offer that they were interested in at that specific point in time”¹⁸.  

However, even if it began as a way to absorb ministerial pressure, the VIP lane became a space where politically connected suppliers could bypass the standard webform and receive quicker responses – even if the subsequent procurement procedures were technically the same. 

Additionally, this ‘ministerial noise’, distracted procurement teams and, at times, drew attention away from potentially more credible offers coming through other channels. An email exchange between officials on 14 April 2020, revealed that they were “drowning in VIP requests” from contacts who often did not have the required certification or did not meet the minimum due diligence requirements. 

Lesson 6: conflicts of interest went unchecked 

Worse still, guidance on managing conflicts of interest was patchy at best. Officials were expected to self-declare, and those involved in the early stages of procurement – where political influence was most active – often fell outside formal conflict checks. As Sir Gareth Rhys Williams admitted, the guidance “missed [the] pre-procurement [stage]”¹⁹, leaving blind spots where ministers and suppliers first made contact. 

The failure to effectively disclose conflicts of interest, as in the case of SG Recruitment – a firm that appeared to have no track record in supplying PPE and had financial ties to a member of the House of Lords – highlighted the weakness of relying on individual judgment in the face of a pressure-plagued system. 

Even as the framework was expanded, public mistrust deepened – made worse by the government’s prolonged delay in publishing contract award notices. Sir Gareth admitted this failure “undermined transparency”²⁰, calling it one of his “deepest regrets”²¹.  

Meanwhile, testimonies from ministers revealed a troubling lack of clarity, or in some cases denial, about what constituted a conflict at all. Lord Bethell dismissed scrutiny of the Randox contract as “politically motivated”²², claiming it “doesn’t qualify as a conflict”²³; and when asked whether a referral based on party loyalty raised concerns, Lord Deighton insisted it would only have been an issue “had I pursued it on any favoured basis.”²⁴ 

Lord Feldman, for his part, couldn’t recall whether those he referred had financial interests, and in one case seemed to lean on political familiarity as a justification for suitability. Civil servant Chris Hall described how: “Lord Feldman… informed me that Stuart Marks was formerly Northern Treasurer of the Conservative Party. This I took to be Lord Feldman’s way of saying that he knew Mr Marks personally and could vouch for him.”²⁵ When asked if the Conservative Party link influenced his response, he replied: “What affected my handling of the offer was not the connection to the Conservative Party. What affected my handling of the offer was that Lord Feldman had some confidence that the counterparty was credible”.²⁶ 

It reflects how the independent assessment of referrals gave way to who was backing the offer, rather than what it was – as noted by Professor Sanchez-Graells: “… if you have not particularly experienced members of staff [dealing] with a new challenge in a very complicated high-pressure area, having repeated chasers, knowing that [on] the other side of an opportunity [there was] not only a company but also a political figure, it would have necessarily changed the way they approached things.”²⁷

Taken together these examples revealed a culture of informal assurances and minimal checks, where declaring a conflict often replaced any real attempt to manage it. As Gavin Hayman, on behalf of the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition put it plainly, “simply declaring a conflict is not enough to mitigate it”²⁸ – a point the Inquiry heard repeatedly.

Final thoughts

The Inquiry also heard that the VIP lane wasn’t solely a vehicle for political favouritism. Several officials acknowledged that it did help surface “genuinely good credible offers”²⁹ at a time when the system was overwhelmed, with many referrals leading to contracts that delivered large volumes of PPE quickly. They emphasise that the VIP lane functioned as a triage tool in an unmanageable environment – not inherently corrupt, but risky by design, with its outcomes ultimately shaped by the absence of clear rules during an emergency situation.

But the waste was considerable and getting the money back has been challenging. So far, just £70 million of an estimated £324 million lost to fraud on PPE deals has been recovered, according to the Department of Health and Social Care’s latest figures. Additionally, the government has managed to claw back just £34 million (or 3.4%) of the almost £1 billion wasted on unusable PPE and around £114 million has been shelled out after cancelling contracts for equipment that wasn’t needed.

Taken together with evidence from the Inquiry, these figures speak to the issue of ensuring accountability. Efforts to recover contested contracts suggest it’s extremely difficult to distinguish clear fraud from opportunistic exploitation. In the most obviously troubling cases some public funds have been returned; whereas many other deals, including those linked to the VIP lane, have not been pursued – with questions over whether there is a viable legal basis to do so. As a whole, it reflects the deeper challenge at the heart of this module: where actions taken under pressure and self-interest blurred. 

If we now have a better understanding of what happened and why, we do not yet know what the Inquiry will recommend to make sure that nothing similar can be allowed to happen in future national emergencies. Before this module began, we called for action in three crucial areas: better conflict of interest management; effective use of the new debarment and exclusion regime; and a new offence of corruption in public office. 

Nothing in the evidence we heard during the course of these hearings has changed our view that ambitious action is urgently needed in all three areas. If these had been in place at the time, it would have sharpened minds and potentially placed some brakes on the reckless setting up of the VIP lane. 

We look forward to seeing what solutions the Inquiry will recommend when it reports its findings next year – by which point the Covid Corruption Commissioner is also expected to have delivered his conclusions. It will then be up to the government to urgently act on the recommendations to avoid repeating the same costly mistakes. 

Footnotes