The contract, valued at up to £9.5 million, was published yesterday (31 August) on the government’s tender portal, but began on 25 July 2023.
It did not disclose information on tonnages. Biffa and the department declined to comment.
The deal with Biffa will form part of the department’s strategy to “rapidly reduce” its stockpile of PPE acquired during the pandemic, which is costing hundreds of millions per year to store. The government acquired more than 37 billion items of PPE, the National Audit Office said, with around 3.14 billion items which were unusable or expired already disposed of.
Around 5.8 billion items of excess PPE is in storage as of March 2023, which is equal to 15% of the total stock purchased.
Committee
During a Public Accounts Committee inquiry in March 2023, Andy Brittain, director general for finance at the department, explained that the department is seeking a “robust strategy” to reduce stockpiles of PPE remaining.
He said: “We have almost a billion units that are not fit for any use, so they will be the next ones for disposal. We will continue to trade off how much we use with how much expires and therefore will need disposal.”
Mr Brittain added: “In essence we are reducing our PPE stockpile as fast as we can. That is through actually using it—we are using about 650 million units a month—and also by setting up a disposal programme for PPE that we know we are not going to use, which is currently working through about 20,000 pallets a month. We have a warehouse network across the country, but as a consequence of that, we have been able to reduce our number of sites from 51 to about 36 storage sites. They are all around the country.
“In terms of storage costs, because we are proceeding, we are going to save around £130 million.”
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