COVID-19: PPE storage still costs taxpayers £580,000 a day, new figures reveal

Published

2 years ago

April 17, 2023

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Government spending on storing personal protective equipment (PPE) in China increased by £2.35m in the year to January – as households struggle to make ends meet amid the cost of living crisis.

According to data revealed by the Labour Party, the taxpayer paid £23.5m to store life-saving protective equipment from February 2021 to January 2022 – but in the same period the following year, that had risen to £25.9m.

Sky News can also reveal that – according to exclusive data from the TaxPayers’ Alliance – the government spent a total of £312m on storing PPE between January 2022 and January 2023.

In January 2023 alone, the total cost of PPE storage amounted to £18m, down from £35m in the same month of 2022, meaning PPE storage is still costing the taxpayer £580,000 a day.

And if this cost per day was replicated for the rest of 2023, we could expect PPE storage to cost £211m in 2023 alone, down from £294m in 2022.

John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “While costs are falling, the COVID hangover is still placing an enormous burden on taxpayers.

“While ministers had to work quickly during unprecedented times, households are still facing an eye-watering bill for mistakes made.

“Ministers must get a grip on this spending once and for all.”

Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “The British public will be understandably sickened by this eye-watering waste of taxpayers’ money.

“With families in Britain set to pay yet another council tax hike forced upon them, they’ll be justly outraged to learn yet more of their hard-earned taxes are still being shipped to China every day to meet eye-watering storage costs for useless PPE they’d already stumped up billions for. It’s adding insult to injury.

“A Labour government will get tough on waste, with an Office of Value for Money to ensure every penny of taxpayers’ money is treated with respect.”

According to the party’s analysis, the amount the government spends on PPE storage in China could be used to pay for 512 tanks of petrol a day – or the annual energy bill for almost 18,000 one-bedroom flats in the UK.

PPE storage costs have fallen since the pandemic and the government has vowed to reduce the sum it spends on storing the 5.8 billion items of excess PPE that the UK still has.

In response, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “Since the height of the pandemic, PPE storage costs have reduced significantly, and we continue to prioritise efforts to minimise them. We have already reduced storage costs by 78% since the first three months of 2021.

“We continue to sell, donate, repurpose and recycle excess PPE in the most cost-effective way, as well as seeking to recover costs from suppliers wherever possible to ensure taxpayer value for money.”

As the UK continues to grapple with the cost of living crisis and ongoing strikes contribute to economic stagnation, government spending continue to come under heavy scrutiny as the tax burden remains the highest in 50 years.

According to the Office for National Statistics, inflation remains at 10.4% and food inflation stands at 18.2% – making everyday essentials more difficult to afford for many families.

UK

Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Published

2 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Rachel Reeves has hinted that taxes are likely to be raised this autumn after a major U-turn on the government’s controversial welfare bill.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment Bill passed through the House of Commons on Tuesday after multiple concessions and threats of a major rebellion.

MPs ended up voting for only one part of the plan: a cut to universal credit (UC) sickness benefits for new claimants from £97 a week to £50 from 2026/7.

Initially aimed at saving £5.5bn, it now leaves the government with an estimated £5.5bn black hole – close to breaching Ms Reeves’s fiscal rules set out last year.

In an interview with The Guardian, the chancellor did not rule out tax rises later in the year, saying there were “costs” to watering down the welfare bill.

“I’m not going to [rule out tax rises], because it would be irresponsible for a chancellor to do that,” Ms Reeves told the outlet.

“We took the decisions last year to draw a line under unfunded commitments and economic mismanagement.

“So we’ll never have to do something like that again. But there are costs to what happened.”

Meanwhile, The Times reported that, ahead of the Commons vote on the welfare bill, Ms Reeves told cabinet ministers the decision to offer concessions would mean taxes would have to be raised.

The outlet reported that the chancellor said the tax rises would be smaller than those announced in the 2024 budget, but that she is expected to have to raise tens of billions more.

It comes after Ms Reeves said she was “totally” up to continuing as chancellor after appearing tearful at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Criticising Sir Keir for the U-turns on benefit reform during PMQs, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the chancellor looked “absolutely miserable”, and questioned whether she would remain in post until the next election.

Sir Keir did not explicitly say that she would, and Ms Badenoch interjected to say: “How awful for the chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she would stay in place.”

In her first comments after the incident, Ms Reeves said she was having a “tough day” before adding: “People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday.

“Today’s a new day and I’m just cracking on with the job.”

Sir Keir also told Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby on Thursday that he “didn’t appreciate” that Ms Reeves was crying in the Commons.

“In PMQs, it is bang, bang, bang,” he said. “That’s what it was yesterday.

“And therefore, I was probably the last to appreciate anything else going on in the chamber, and that’s just a straightforward human explanation, common sense explanation.”

UK

Diogo Jota and Andre Silva’s funeral in pictures

Published

3 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota and Andre Silva's funeral in pictures

The family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva have been joined by Liverpool stars past and present and other Portuguese players at the pair’s funeral near Porto.

The Liverpool forward, 28, and his brother died in a car crash in Spain on Thursday.

Pictures below show the funeral at the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in the town of Gondomar near Porto. Click here for our liveblog coverage of the day’s events.

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Miguell Rocha played with Jota for around ten years with Gondomar Sport Clube in Portugal.

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The former captain was seen wiping away tears as he read messages and laid his tribute down.

UK

How Britain’s most notorious gangster turned up at a charity lunch to fact-check a retired detective’s talk

Published

8 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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How Britain's most notorious gangster turned up at a charity lunch to fact-check a retired detective's talk

Britain’s most notorious gangster and the detective who pursued him have been involved in a bizarre confrontation…at a charity lunch.

Former Detective Superintendent Ian Brown was at a Kent golf club and about to give a talk on the infamous £26m Brink’s-Mat gold robbery when he was summoned from the stage by officials.

Mr Brown, who appeared on the award-winning Sky News StoryCast podcast The Hunt For The Brink’s-Mat Gold in 2019, said: “I go outside and they say ‘he’s here’ and I say ‘who’s here’ and they say that table over there in the corner, that’s Kenny Noye with a baseball cap pulled down over his head.”

Noye stabbed to death an undercover policeman during the Brink’s-Mat investigation, but was acquitted of murder, though he was jailed for handling the stolen gold.

After his release, he used a knife again in the M25 road-rage murder of motorist Stephen Cameron.

“They said what are we going to do?” said Mr Brown.

“I said are you serving food? Well, just use plastic knives.”

Although Mr Brown had not personally arrested Noye over Brink’s-Mat he had identified him as a suspect months after the robbery.

Years later he met him during an ill-fated TV interview in which he quizzed him about his role in the robbery.

He said: “He told me everything I wanted to know except the truth. He still insists he had nothing to do with it.”

The interview was never broadcast after the prison authorities threatened to send Noye back to jail for a breach of his parole.

Mr Brown, 86, said: “I went over to him and said ‘thanks for coming, nice of you to pop in’, but I don’t believe you’ve turned up with your sons and grandkids to listen to me telling how you killed a police officer.

“And he said ‘I want to make sure you don’t say I’ve been dealing drugs’ and I said ‘I’ve never said that Kenny’.”

The retired detective told Noye he wasn’t going to change his presentation just because he was there.

“He said ‘mate, I wouldn’t expect you to and I’ll come up [on stage] if you want me to’.

“Can you think how he’s turned up with his family to listen to somebody talking about you killing the police? Now, you put logic on that.”

The bizarre story emerged when I rang Mr Brown after I’d been told about the meeting.

I also wanted to ask him about the recent BBC hit drama series The Gold which retold the story of the Brink’s-Mat heist at Heathrow Airport in 1983.

“It was an absolute shambles, far too much dramatic licence and the real story was so much better,” said the ex-detective, whose job had been to follow the trail of the 6,800 gold bars to the US and the Caribbean.

He said he chatted to one of the show’s writers for a long time in a phone call but then heard no more.

“They invented people, changed a bit here and there and made it politically correct in so many ways. I’m just very sad that that is what people will believe.

“And I couldn’t work out who my character was supposed to be. I could have been one of the female cops.”

He also criticised the portrayal of Noye, now 78, as a likeable jack-the-lad character when the truth about the double killer with a volatile temper was quite different.