An FOI request of the Health and Safety Executive in relation to PPE supplied to the Department of Health by Pestfix has turned up some quite extraordinary material. THREAD
The first is that, although the DHSC has refused in the litigation to release price data for the £32m coverall contract (or at all), the HSE has released that price data further to the FOI request. It shows we paid Crisp Websites £14.02 per coverall (plus shipping).
A comparison price today from Unicef (supply.unicef.org/s0305117.html) for type 6B coveralls is $8.12 (i.e. less than half what we paid Crisp Websites).
Of course, prices of coveralls have fallen since the height of the first wave but this huge price differential raises real questions about why we purchased (by my calculations: see attached thread) c. 36 years worth of supply at top of the market prices.
Second, it seems pretty clear DHSC did not know what it was buying when we entered into this £32m contract for what the deliverables describe as "isolation suits" (first pic). The embedded "Specification" we bought to shows they met standard EN 14126:2003...
... but this email (which I *believe* to be from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency) says they also need EN 13034 certification and I can't find any suggestion in the "Specification" that they do.

Note also "not for C-19 h/c use".
You can see the same point about EN 14126 specification in Government's own technical specifications for "type 6B coveralls" (assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…) which this Pestfix supply ends up being released as (albeit the path to that result is an, umm, interesting one).
So initially, after we bring judicial review proceedings) there are multiple emails rejecting the Pestfix coveralls. See eg the below (although there are LOTS of examples in the FOI disclosure).
That, of course, is not the answer that Government wants in order to be to tell the High Court what a marvellous job it did on PPE procurement. And it leads to this *extraordinary* email from the Health and Safety Executive.
A few points about the email: the Health and Safety Executive is, it seems, being asked to provide false evidence by Government to enable it to defend @GoodLawProject's litigation. HSE is being "bombarded with calls" and feels under so much pressure that it needs legal advice.
Another email from Hatmill - which I believe to be an external agency providing support to Government - observes drily that "There seems to be quite a bit of 'political' pressure to get these through the QA process" (I assume QA refers to Quality Assurance).
Meanwhile Pestfix is writing and saying "we do not want it to be made public-knowledge that PPE from Pestfix has not passed HSE inspection."
At one stage even the Army gets involved...
Someone at the Army tries to "expedite testing of the Pestfix coveralls" and offers to have the NHS explain "the importance/sensitivity behind the testing." Eventually, it is said, someone else is "able to lean in and help."
This huge effort - across Government and the Army - must cause one to doubt the veracity of this response to our judicial review of Government's unlawful failure to publish c. £4bn of contracts.

Do they not have time - as they here suggest - or do they just not want to?
Anyway, eventually they manage to persuade themselves that, although the contract originally specified "Isolation Gown/Suit" and the product was labelled as an "isolation gown", it could actually be released as something different (a "coverall").
Meanwhile, in September (this saga started in June) HSE is still receiving requests from DHSC "the majority... via telephone" for "statements to the effect that HSE assessed the products and they were compliant" but this is "not factually correct."
The £32m coveralls contract is not the only one we entered into with Crisp Websites trading as Pestfix.

We also entered into a £168.5m contract for three different types of masks contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/41cfea2….
And you'll recall earlier in the thread, I showed you this email which talks about "some rejected RPE masks... supplied to Gov.uk by Crisp Websites..."
Well, the FOI disclosure also contains a test report carried out for Crisp Websites for N99 (which I understand to the US version of FFP3) masks. And it shows they failed.
Procuring PPE is very complex; I can't pretend entirely to understand it. And there was undoubtedly huge demand at the height of the first wave. But there is consistent noise about good quality suppliers being rejected.
And the notion that we should invest billions - Sunak committed c. £15bn to PPE - sending non-specialists into a complex and highly supply constrained market and expect them to source it well is, umm, challenging.
The consistent noise that I hear from experienced suppliers with a track record is (a) they were rejected in favour of arrivistes and (b) we bought vast quantities - likely wasted many billions - on PPE that was only ever going to be duff.
In case you want to look into the FOI disclosures yourself here is the entire disclosure (1drv.ms/u/s!AgDubbkGwE…) and here is my attempt to gather the emails together into a vaguely chronological order (1drv.ms/w/s!AgDubbkGwE…).

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Jo Maugham

Jo Maugham Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @JolyonMaugham

15 Nov
Here's Julia Lopez, a Cabinet Office Minister, promising an "internal review" into private contracts awarded during the pandemic. theguardian.com/world/2020/nov… Image
And here's Julia Lopez with the head of Uniserve, Iain Liddell. julialopez.co.uk/news/visiting-… Image
And here's a list of the £290m of PPE contracts awarded to Uniserve (a logistics firm) (that have so far been published). ImageImageImage
Read 9 tweets
15 Nov
Some righteous fury from @KamranAbbasi on the "state corruption on a grand scale" of this Government's response to the pandemic. bmj.com/content/371/bm…
So many of the outrages Kamran identifies we at @GoodLawProject are challenging by judicial review.

The disgraceful £100bn Moonshot project, embarked on without the consent of Parliament or consulting its own expert body, the NSC (crowdjustice.com/case/operation…). Image
The Government's disgraceful attempt to suppress research proving it was wrong to spend £75m on the basis of biased research (crowdjustice.com/case/abingdon-…). Image
Read 9 tweets
14 Nov
So if we carried on using PPE at the same rate as at the height of the first wave we would use about 6.8bn items in a year. gov.uk/government/pub…
Which makes it rather odd that Government itself says we have purchased 36.7bn items - well over *five years* supply assuming we continue to use it at the highest rates we ever have.
Indeed we bought so much that we don't have warehouse space for it and eleven thousand containers of it are clogging up Felixstowe. theguardian.com/business/2020/…
Read 7 tweets
13 Nov
So the Government spent £75m on tests on the basis of a 'preprint' study which was not peer reviewed, was funded by some of the consortium developing and producing the test, and which wrongly suggested that the test gave no false positive results. bmj.com/content/371/bm…
"If the test is used in the community as intended, and assuming that 10% of recipients have previously been infected, around one in five positive AbC-19 tests would be a false positive, the findings suggest."
We also know from this report from @sarahboseley
yesterday that the Government tried to supress publication of the study that exposed the flaws in the non-peer-reviewed "pre-print". theguardian.com/world/2020/nov…
Read 4 tweets
12 Nov
Absolutely staggering. After @GoodLawProject sued DHSC for unlawfully procuring PPE from Pestfix, DHSC put pressure on the Health and Safety Executive to lie and say that Pestfix PPE had passed safety checks. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-548977…
Government entered into 11 contracts with tiny pest control specialist Pestfix. Government has (unlawfully) failed to publish five. The six we can see sum to about a third of a billion pounds. At least one was bought on the basis of fake documents. Image
We will, of course, be drawing this email correspondence to the attention of the High Court urgently. And we need to see the entirety of it but there is at the very least a suspicion that DHSC has sought to conjure up false evidence to put before the High Court.
Read 6 tweets
12 Nov
In which a £75million contract was awarded without competition on the basis of profoundly flawed research. And when confronted with evidence of those flaws Government tried to suppress publication of that evidence. crowdjustice.com/case/abingdon-…
You can read more about the Abingdon Health debacle here. (And there is more to come tomorrow.) theguardian.com/world/2020/nov…
It's worth reading this piece from back in August by the redoubtable @deeksj about flaws in the Abingdon tests. This Govt has a rather worrying habit of presenting misleading data to support the businesses it gives hugely valuable public contracts to. 🤔 theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!