The High Court trial between PPE Medpro and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) drew towards its conclusion today, with a blistering set of closing submissions from the defence that portrayed the government’s £122 million claim as a desperate attempt to deflect attention from its own pandemic procurement failures.
Describing the case as “no more than opportunistic,” PPE Medpro’s legal team argued that the DHSC had never needed the 25 million surgical gowns in question, and that its claim was built on weak evidence, flawed assumptions, and a refusal to accept responsibility for a chaotic PPE stockpile that had spiralled out of control.
“This is a textbook case of buyer’s remorse,” the defence said, “where the DHSC is looking for ways to escape from a contract it wished it had never made.”
The closing submissions highlighted that by December 2020, the government had amassed around 500 weeks’ worth of surgical gown stock—close to a decade’s supply—according to its own witnesses. Rather than putting the PPE Medpro gowns to use, the DHSC simply warehoused them across the UK, including in open-air container parks and fields, where they remained for more than 18 months.
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