Thread by @JolyonMaugham

One of the contracts that Government finally published last week was this £168.5m contract with tiny pest control specialist Pestfix for three different types of facemasks. atamis-1928.cloudforce.com/sfc/p/#0O00000…

Now, you may have wondered whether it was wise to spend a third of a billion with such a company (with five contracts illegally remaining unpublished). And you may not find justifications like this ('the director's wife is a vet and has family in China') especially compelling.

I mean, if you put facemasks into the NHS or care homes and they were faulty, people could die, right?

So you would have been dismayed to see that in August Pestfix admitted supplying duff FFP3 facemasks, one of the types supplied to the NHS under the £168.5m contract.

Surely Govt couldn't get it so wrong as to spend a third of a billion with a tiny unqualified company that was repeatedly getting it wrong?

Could it? This Pestfix recall notice, for FFP2 masks (another type purchased under the same £168.5m contract), has just come to light.

We found out about the first one because Pestfix put up a bravely named "Product Compliance Statement" on its website. But that attracted a bit of negative press attention and it didn't do that for the second type of faulty facemask.

(FWIW, I also think the tens or hundreds of millions Government spent on isolation suits from Pestfix was wasted, as I explain from here

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1299390928399065088?s=19

).

You might even think this illustrates why Government's whole strategy - of buying from chancers, hedge-funds and friends, rather than established suppliers - was always going to be a hugely expensive blunder.