The Government is paying to rent storage space in China for up to 1.6 billion items of unused PPE, it can be revealed.
The Mirror revealed in November the eye-watering £1m a day cost of storing items in shipping containers piled high at sites around the country.
But Ministers have now confirmed the Government had renting some 9,512 containers since the start of the pandemic.
And they admitted billions of masks, gowns and gloves never made it out of Shanghai.
In answer to parliamentary questions, Tory Health Minister Edward Argar refused to name the locations of storage facilities, because it was “commercially sensitive.”
But he agreed to list the sites by county, revealing 23 sites in ten counties within the UK - and one in Shanghai.
Each UK site is likely to hold several storage containers, containing billions of stockpiled items of protective clothing, masks and gloves.
And officials fear the items will deteriorate because of being stored in these conditions.
"It's extraordinary that we're spending money to rent storage containers in China for PPE that didn't even make it onto a boat,” said Christian Matheson, the Labour MP who obtained the information.
"These people couldn't even run a pound shop."
In November, the Mirror revealed the Government had paid contractor Uniserve £124 million for “storage costs.”
And the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) spent £7m last summer buying shipping containers to slash storage costs for tens of billions of items of PPE.
A spokesman said at the time it was a cost-effective way to meet storage needs.
It comes after the Government was forced to write off £8.7 billion on lost, overpriced or unusable PPE.
The DHSC’s annual report, published last week show huge amounts wasted on useless equipment, while millions of pounds has been spent getting out of contracts or storing PPE at ports.
But this week Tory Health Minister Ed Argar made “no apology” for the scramble to secure masks and gowns in the early months of the pandemic.
“The action we took protected thousands of frontline healthcare workers in the NHS and social care,” he told MPs.
"However, now that the world market for PPE has stabilised, the value of some categories of goods is now inevitably much lower than the price they were originally purchased for."
He insisted 97% of the PPE ordered was deemed “suitable for use”.
However, this figure will include hundreds of millions of items that had to be used in schools because they were not suitable for their original purpose in the NHS.
Some £2.6bn was spent on PPE that was not deemed suitable for use in health settings.
The DHSC annual report the government is still spending “in the region of £500k per day” on storage costs, and that the PPE in shipping containers is ”not accessible and will deteriorate if kept in poor storage conditions.”
According to the report: “The Department’s records show that as at 31 March 2021, it held 7.5 billion items in 16,000 containers at UK ports plus a further 1.6 billion of items in storage in China; however, because it did not complete its year end stock counts it is unable to confirm this.”
The report also reveals the department was forced to pay £649,000 in cancellation fees for two flights from China that were scrapped because the PPE they were meant to be bringing to the UK was not available.
