Thread by @t0nyyates

Hard to know what to make of this IMO. Others seem to react with instant outrage, but I find myself thinking:

https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1488494435679838209

1. To begin with, some uncertainty about what PPE quality/type would be needed. Early procurement errors might be expected, and indicative of a precautionary policy of buying whatever you can.

2. There was a mad scramble for PPE, at a time of very high demand, and supply constraints binding. Perhaps to be expcted that there would be some overpayment - doing that and securing a trade better than underpaying and getting nothing.

3. Not at all surprising or indicative of a policy error that there would be write downs because the price had fallen and existing stocks were worth less than when we bought them. That's the market.

4. Buying too much is understandable too. It could indicate an error. Or corruption. But it could also be a policy of over rather than under purchasing, given that we didn't know how much we would need.

5. Contracting firms with little track record is not on the face of it irreconcilable with a prudent policy. If you are worried you might be short, why not try some experimental purchases? Better to waste some money on cowboys and rent-extractors than find yourself short.

6. Given all that, ie putting oneself in the shoes of the procurement operation at the time, knowing what they knew and the uncertainties they face, I'm not sure what an ex ante optimal policy would look like and how much therefore of the 'waste' is hindsight or genuine.

I say these things - in case you are reading this and haven't followed my tweets during the pandemic - overall having felt that govt pandemic policy was reckless+callous and killed many tens of thousands more than was necessary.

Just to draw out the implications of point 3 - and also see @dsquareddigest - obviously we were buying when the price was high [demand high, supply low] and now valuing whne demand is low [covid is sort of over] and the price is low [suppy is up and running]. No way round it.

You might counter: 'well why did not we not have adequate stocks beforehand to avoid buying at the crunch time in a panic, making all the errors we did?' This is a more general critique of our lack of pandemic preparedness.

With the benefit of hindsight, obvs we were woefully unprepared on many dimensions, not just PPE. But similarly it is a stretch to argue that we should have / could have foreseen the need to the extent where we had stocks that enabled us to ride out the PPE crunch.

If we look at the situation now: having just lived through a particular respiratory pandemic. What is the optimal level and kind of stocks to hold now? Given their deterioration/depreciation. Given uncertainty about what the disease in the next pandemic will be.

It's quite easy to imagine that we would take a decision and then look back and realize we got that wrong too.

Add to all that that the people doing the procuring were not professional at scale PPE procurers. It was a new situation. If you put me on a trading desk I guarantee that for a few weeks I would make some serious mistakes and lose money. [Part of the reason why I just tweet].

Some replies have pointed to the fact that NHS staff died due to inadequate PPE. This is a good point. But it does raise the sordid but necessary question: what would the optimal PPE/pandemic policy generally imply for the number of NHS staff deaths?

Sadly, I doubt that the optimal number would be zero. Just as the optimal pandemic policy would not imply zero deaths in the population at large. The resources, knowledge to deliver that are probably just not there.

That is not to justify the NHS deaths that we saw. Overall the UK govt caused many tens of thousands of needless deaths generally, through its pandemic policy failures.

Those deaths resulted from higher than necessary prevalence of covid, and surely some NHS staff deaths resulted from that.

But esp given the overall pandemic policy, I doubt that there is a PPE policy that would have been feasible or desirable that delivered zero NHS deaths and eliminated risk altogether.