Thread by @allthecitizens

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Over £22.4bn has gone to just 50 companies in UK Gov Covid-19 contracts since the start of the pandemic.

In total, over 1,500 companies were involved in a UK contract bonanza worth £52.5bn – more than the Gross Domestic Product of 140 nation states and territories.

The top 5 companies won £9.2bn or 30% of the total amount given out in contracts since March 2020. This alone is more than the 2019 GDP of countries like Nicaragua and Armenia, according to World Bank data.

1,593 firms have been awarded contracts since March 2020. These total £33.1bn (not including framework agreements), a figure greater than the GDP of Paraguay or Cameroon.

The top 5 firms make up almost 1/3rd of the value of total contracts.
The top 50 make up 2/3rds (67%).

The company given the most money by the UK govt was Innova Medical Group. It was awarded contracts worth £3,191,256,968. This is greater than the GDP of Sierra Leone or Burundi.

Most of the Innova contracts were for Covid test kits, which the US government says are inaccurate and should be thrown away. HuffPost reports that the DHSC has now bought test kits from China-based Zhejiang Orient Gene Biotech “at undisclosed cost”. huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/pm-under…

The National Audit Office also recently criticised the Test and Trace programme, saying that only 96 million out of 691 million test kits distributed by Innova had been registered as used. 360dx.com/point-care-tes…

Out of the total value of £52.5 billion we have so far seen awarded in response to the pandemic, we calculate that at least £27.5 billion of that has been awarded without competitive tender.

The cost of Test and Trace for 2020-2022 is more than the GDP of countries like Jordan, Azerbaijan and Latvia. And the cost could rise if Covid becomes endemic in the population, or if new variants mean that the programme has to be continued beyond 2022.

Around 2/3rds of the total awarded in individual contracts - £22.4 billion - went to just 50 companies.

So 0.03% of companies awarded contracts have won 2/3rds of the total value of government money awarded - a significant concentration of wealth towards a small number of firms

In Nov 2020, the Financial Times reported that “the UK has spent more money fighting coronavirus than almost all comparable countries but still languishes towards the bottom of league tables of economic performance in 2020 and deaths caused by the virus” ft.com/content/1f52fd…

IMF data also shows that the UK has spent a larger proportion of its GDP on its Covid19 response than any other European country. Only the US has spent a greater proportion of its GDP on its pandemic response. atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econogra…

Our figures represent only the money spent by public bodies on procuring goods and services, largely from the private sector. The total bill for the pandemic is likely to be in the hundreds of billions of pounds.

Last year, the UK borrowed almost £300 billion, according to the BBC, and the cost of the furlough scheme is currently around £100 billion on its own. bbc.co.uk/news/business-…

iNews, citing the Office of Budget Responsibility, puts borrowing for 2020-21 at £355 billion, and says that the pandemic has cost £340 billion so far, with half of this going on the furlough scheme, grants and increased benefits. inews.co.uk/news/uk/covid-…

The government has serious questions to answer about why they have spent so much money when the UK has had one of the worst economic and health impacts of any country from Covid.

This article was brought to you by @BylineBITE and @allthecitizens.

Catch the full @BylineTimes write-up from @jwsal below:
bylinetimes.com/2021/07/12/uk-…