Introduction

One of the notorious failings of the UK government in its reaction to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was its inability to ensure that the health and social care frontline had proper and undisrupted access to essential personal protective equipment (PPE), such as masks, gowns and gloves. The story of the failings leading to the PPE fiasco runs largely in parallel to the also failed attempt at boosting the availability of ventilators through the ‘Ventilator Challenge’, and the not more successful subsequent ‘Test and Trace’ programme, including its doubling down in ‘Operation Moonshot’ – which, at the time of writing, has been assessed to be having a marginal impact on the prevention and management of the second wave.

These stories offer a cautionary tale for the future management of extremely urgent public procurement, which will become ever more important given the serious risks of social and ecological breakdown derived from climate change. These stories show the very significant problems that result from having a public sector with insufficient procurement capability, an inadequate procurement strategy and (perhaps more importantly) a very weak procurement governance system largely incapable of ensuring the accountability for outsourced tasks in the public interest (Boeger and Sanchez-Graells, 2019). Perhaps even worse, these stories are not news at all, and the underlying problems not only concern extremely urgent procurement, but also complex procurement projects, as the second phase of the Grenfell Tower Disaster Inquiry is further evidencing.

In this chapter, I will concentrate on the PPE fiasco in the context of the English NHS to explore these broader governance issues. By focusing on the case study of PPE procurement during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, my main goal is to lay bare the more general problems in the UK government's approach to the governance of public procurement and its increasing insularity as a result of Brexit, with the hope that this will show a path for change that could avert even more significant fiascos in the face of the massive challenges that climate change is yet to bring.

Background

There is no need to rehearse here the reasons why the continued availability of adequate PPE is essential to the ability of the health and social care frontline to do their best to save lives.