Tory donor’s company awarded £4.5 million Government contract to take care of a mountain of unusable PPE waste

A £4.5 million Government contract has been handed to a company headed up by a major Conservative Party donor to dispose of unused PPE, Good Law Project can reveal.

C lipper Logistics – whose boss, Steven Parkin, has donated over £700,000 to the Party’s coffers – was previously awarded a contract worth at least £11 million to distribute PPE, without having to see off any competition.

This latest revelation – buried in thousands of procurement contracts published by the Government in line with its transparency obligations – shines the spotlight on how the Government’s cronies are profiting from both ends of the PPE scandal.

The Government is still spending around £2 million a week to store over 13 billion items of PPE which went unused as they did not meet NHS standards.

Ministers are now dishing out multi-million-pound contracts to companies to dispose of mountains of gloves, gowns, and kits deemed unfit for purpose, but originally bought at sky-high prices brokered via middlemen, often with little or no due diligence checks.

Back in October 2020, Good Law Project first exposed the illegal ‘VIP Lane’ used by Ministers at the height of the pandemic to buy PPE from Conservative Party donors and associates, outside normal procurement channels.

An eye-watering £4 billion worth of contracts were awarded through the VIP Lane. Over the last two years, Good Law Project has been working hard to uncover a plethora of these dodgy dealings.

Good Law Project will continue to unearth examples of where Ministers misused public money and dodged transparency during the pandemic through the use of private emails and back channels. We want to stop people like Gove, Hancock, Lord Agnew, and Lord Bethell from rewriting history and shifting the blame.

We have approached Clipper Logistics for comment.

Sources

• Text: This piece was originally published in Good Law Project and re-published in PMP Magazine on 14 December 2022, with the authors’ consent. | The authors write in a personal capacity.
• Cover: Adobe Stock/InkheartX.