What a Total disgrace – £1.4bn of PPE Destroyed

Fashion-Enter Ltd CEO Jenny Holloway comments on the recent BBC investigation that revealed about £1.4bn worth of PPE aprons, masks and goggles, which were fully compliant and delivered in good order, were incinerated, recycled or written off.

Jenny: “What a total disgrace, £1.4bn of PPE sat in container ships and destroyed. How many UK manufacturing jobs would that have saved? 

“What a disaster that was in what must be the most wasteful government deal of the pandemic.

“It is believed that at least 1.57 billion items of PPE provided by Full Support Healthcare is to be binned. The Department of Health and Social Care were all over UK factories at the beginning of the pandemic. At FEL we stopped all production to support our glorious NHS, only to then be ignored for mainstream contracts!

“Think of the jobs you could have saved in the UK? Think of all those carbon emissions created flying these unused garments to the UK, resulting in landfill or incineration! 

“You don’t need to order 100,000s of items at a time either if you use proximity sourcing right here in the UK and keep waste to a minimum. 

“When I think about how we were proudly making 20,000 PPE items a week for the NHS in 2020/1 and then a big fat nothing forcing us to close our beloved factory in Wales I could spontaneously human combust with rage! 

“The tragedy of it all – a disgraceful waste of public funds! Tax payers money going up in smoke!

“We are not giving up and we’re not going away. We are still knocking on the door of the NHS to offer reusable PPE that also fits correctly. Public procurement contracts should have a minimum of 20% made in the UK – and the new government would do well to support this.”