Health consultants say that PPE in the UK costs approximately £6.7 million a week

The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Social Care, Sir Chris Wormald, told MPs that it currently spends about £6.7 million a week to store the UK’s personal protective equipment (PPE) inventory.

“The current situation-we bought about 32 billion pieces of personal protective equipment during the pandemic, at a cost of about 15 billion pounds,” he told the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons.

“Among them, 11.7 billion pieces have been distributed to the front line so far, 12.6 billion pieces are in the UK as a central inventory, and 8.4 billion pieces are not yet in the UK. It is ordered from other parts of the world.

“I think today’s figures, of course, these figures will fluctuate up and down, we need to spend about 6.7 million pounds a week to store our PPE core inventory.

“The rate of decline is very fast now, the equivalent figure on January 21 was 11.6 million pounds, so we have achieved some considerable efficiencies in storage, but this is still a huge cost.”