MPs have said the government needs to learn how to better manage crises like the COVID-19 pandemic in order to tackle fraud and error, which cost taxpayers billions of pounds.
The Committee of Public Accounts (CPA) has issued a report looking into the challenges and opportunities across Whitehall during the period that Britain opened up after two years of lockdowns.
The report, published on Tuesday, said that the government has been “too slow” to recover taxpayer funds lost owing to wasted expenditure on personal protective equipment (PPE) and related COVID-19 expenditure, which comes to £14.9 billion across the last two years.
The CPA looked into 22 contracts awarded by the government to Randox for testing services, worth a maximum total value of £776.9 million. In the first contract the committee recorded failures in basic record-keeping and gaps in conflict-of-interest declarations. The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) also marked supplier offers as “VIP” if they had been referred from ministers, MPs, or Number 10, the inquiry said….