It gets worse for the Department of Health and Social Care. The public sector’s auditor in chief, Garett Davies, refused to give a clean bill of health to the department’s 2020/21 accounts, he “qualified” the accounts (in the jargon) because “£1.3 billion…
of the Department’s COVID-19 spending was spent either without the necessary HM Treasury approvals or in breach of conditions set by HM Treasury. Davies has also qualified his regularity opinion due to insufficient evidence to show that the Department’s spending, particularly…
on COVID-19 procurement, was not subject to a material level of fraud”. He is basically saying the department failed the test of competence. The findings that the department may have been subject to “material” fraud and breached Treasury stipulations are damning…
These failures happened while Matt Hancock was health secretary. He would have been under pressure to take responsibility and resign if still there. Presumably there will have to be an internal DHSC inquiry into all this. Officials and ministers may have been at serious fault…
And for the avoidance of doubts, those £8.7bn of PPE losses I revealed earlier were uncovered by the NAO
I should of course point out that the DHSC was under extreme pressure at the start of the crisis. In part that pressure was greater because of years of austerity, plus a failure to prepare for crisis and build resilience into the system. That said some of its chaotic…
procurement of PPE may be understandable and perhaps forgivable, because of the extreme need to make good the lack of PPE to protect health and care workers.
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