Spending on personal protective equipment (PPE) was given a seismic boost as the chancellor allocated £15bn to procure masks, gowns and gloves – a sum that dwarfs the entire spending of other Whitehall departments.
The vast investment, unveiled during Rishi Sunak’s summer update on Wednesday, is four times more than the annual foreign office budget and reveals the scale of the financial cost needed to fight the Covid-19. The sum alsounderlines how keen the government is to avoid any criticism of ill preparedness should the country suffer a second peak.
A further £10bn will be spent on what the Treasury is describing as a Test, Trace, Contain and Enable programme, and Labour said there would be heavy scrutiny on how this money is spent.
Meg Hillier MP, chair of the Commons’ public accounts committee, said they have asked the government for a clear plan on how they will manage PPE stocks.
“They keep unveiling telephone number figures but not a plan to back it up. It takes time to get the flow right and we’ve had problems with the supply chain,” she said.
“The tragedy would be throwing money at bad PPE and that’s not good for anybody.”
Earlier in the pandemic there were embarrassing scenes for the government when they despatched an RAF plane to Turkey to bring back equipment only to find it was not up to standard.
Rachel Reeves MP, shadow cabinet minister, is demanding the government provide more details of the £10bn they have allocated to spend on testing.
She said: “Early in the crisis the government wasted the opportunity to build on existing expertise and experience within our public services for contact tracing and instead ministers chose to hand lucrative contracts to a handful of outsourcing companies including some with a questionable record of delivery.
“We have not been testing the number of people promised by ministers and the world-beating tracing strategy is a far cry from what we have today. We need to see a full breakdown of the £10bn the government has allocated for testing and tracing to ensure that this money is being spent in the most effective way to limit the spread of Covid-19.”
Overall the money spent on public health by the chancellor runs to £50bn in total when schools, public transport and devolved administration costs are included.
There will be £1bn more to procure additional ventilators to support the NHS.
A further £5.5bn will go on health services, including the use of independent sector facilities, improving the NHS discharge process, delivering medicines to those who are vulnerable and shielding and keeping our pharmacies and GP practices open during bank holidays.