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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Anna Bawden

UK government wasted nearly £10bn on unused Covid PPE, figures show

NHS staff putting on PPE
The government said it did ‘everything possible to secure protective equipment for frontline health and care workers’. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA

Ministers have been accused of throwing away taxpayers’ money “as if it were confetti” after official figures revealed that the government wasted nearly £10bn on defective or unusable personal protective equipment during the Covid crisis.

Annual accounts for the Department of Health and Social Care published on Thursday show that nearly three-quarters of the money it spent on PPE during the pandemic has been written off.

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