General Election 2024

Out of all the corrupt stuff that went on during COVID, that PPE story seemed ok. Supplied garments were good quality but not used, so landed up being more like an expensive insurance policy against running out. Can't believe incinerating it is better than sending it to somewhere that would use it though.

It has a use-by date. Other countries might not accept it, or be willing to pay for it to be delivered there. If it's been sat outside for months it may not be usable any more. But, yes, I hope there is a valid reason why it can't go somewhere else.

Traditionally (before Covid) there were huge warehouses that would store a good stock of PPE. Enough for x months of usage. If something had a shelf life of 2 years then ideally you'd have ~18 months of stuff in storage so that as the new stuff came in the oldest stuff was being shipped out to be used in hospitals. Still in date and perfectly usable. Supply Chain 101.

This warehousing costs a considerable amount of money, and so the bean counters of the Tory Government decided to slash that cost by cutting down on the storage costs for these reserves.

And, being classic Tories, they didn't want to upset the producers of the PPE by reducing their purchases, so they just destroyed some of the stock to free up warehouses and bring down the costs that way.

Then the pandemic hit, and they need to swing massively the other way. Yes, buying too much just in case was the right idea (although often a poor implementation), but they would have been in a much better situation had they kept paying to keep an ~18 month stockpile.

The Government even did some planning on this: Exercise Cygnus. And the result was a bunch of recommendations which were then ignored in the main.

They [the Tories] did exactly the same with fuel storage in the UK prior to the invasion of Ukraine. They looked at how much they were spending on just maintaining a reserve that was rarely used, and opted for the short term gain of selling it off.

At the end of the day it was just incompetence. Anyone with a brain would look at the longer term view and would have worked out why these stockpiles existed and why we needed to just suck up paying a chunk of money each month to maintain them. Because 1 in 100 year events happen every so often.