Unused personal protective equipment bought for hundreds of thousands of pounds is being auctioned off by the Government for as little as £250.
Millions of surplus aprons, visors, hand sanitisers and goggles are going under the hammer on the auction website Ramco as the Government bids to stop paying out millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash to store stock.
Labour analysis using average unit prices from the National Audit Office suggests that the Government may have shelled out more than £600,000 for the goods at the height of the pandemic in 2020.
Ten lots of kits are now being sold with a starting price of just £250 - with bidding ending on Tuesday.
A 24-pallet lot of 64,800 goggles has a bid of £250 while 187,200 aprons have an offer of £250.
Buyers must have their own lorry and be willing to pick up the goods from various locations around the UK, the auction note states.
It comes after Government accounts for 2020/21 revealed around £8.7 billion spent on useless protective gear has been written off.
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: "The Conservatives wasted billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on useless PPE that they’re now giving away for virtually nothing.
"If they hadn’t been so wasteful with the public’s money, the Government might not need to raise taxes on working people in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis."
News of the PPE fire sale was slipped out as Parliament went into recess last week.
Health Minister Edward Argar said: “To date we have achieved the sale of 330 million masks to two private companies, and we have other deals in the pipeline.
“We are also about to launch an online auction to sell PPE, so individuals and companies may bid for our excess stock.”
He said 23 million visors had been recycled into food trays and surplus aprons were being turned into bin bags.
Products that cannot be recycled, sold or repurposed will be binned.
Overall, the Department of Health claimed “the amount taxpayers will save from taking this decisive action would, for example, be enough to employ around 1,850 nurses for a year".
Last month, MPs were told that the Government was planning to burn mountains of unusable PPE bought during the pandemic.
Jonathan Marron, DHSC director general of office for health improvement and disparities, told the Commons Public Accounts Committee: "We're currently appointing to what are called lead waste partners, commercial firms who do this as their business who will help us recycle and we're also exploring using it for... waste to provide power.
"We think we move up to 15,000 pallets a month when we get these contracts in place, so a really significant way of seeing recycling increase and indeed using some of the product to drive power generation."
