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‘It is,” says one contributor to The Covid Contracts: Follow the Money, “probably the biggest misspending scandal in the UK of all time.” When a documentary tries to bring an underreported outrage to a wider audience, it helps to have attention-grabbing quotes like that. But as the evidence about the Covid “VIP lane” affair is collated by this cool, clear investigation, “biggest misspending scandal of all time” starts to look like an understatement.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the UK in the early months of 2020, doctors and nurses urgently required large amounts of personal protective equipment (PPE): the disposable masks, goggles and gowns that would allow them to treat an infectious disease without contracting it themselves. Our impoverished NHS did not own adequate stockpiles of PPE, so the Conservative government of the day set about buying it in. It appealed for companies that were not part of the regular NHS supply chain to pitch their services.
So far, so good. But the UK also set up something that neighbouring countries didn’t have: a VIP lane. Applications that were recommended or passed on by persons deemed to be important – often senior Conservative party politicians – were given special treatment. This film cites internal emails stating that “[the] VIP route is for MPs who can make life painful and shout loudly”, and that such inquiries were to be funnelled to an inbox named “Covid-PPE-priority-appraisals”. As a leaked briefing document put it: “Opportunities from high-profile people require a rapid response.”
Many of the companies that applied via the VIP lane were very swiftly given colossal sums of money to provide PPE. Even this favouritism – towards firms run by well-connected types who could contact people in power directly – might not have been so bad, had they been established PPE suppliers. But often they had no track record in the field. Several had only just been incorporated. We hear from a veteran PPE supplier who says his applications to the government were ignored, to the point that he resorted to the inefficient alternative of selling directly to individual NHS trusts. Friends of the Tories were given national contracts, worth tens or hundreds of millions of pounds, within weeks.
One of the main defences used by MPs and lords who forwarded applications is that they didn’t decide whether their associates were actually awarded contracts, but Follow the Money makes it clear that they didn’t need to: a guiding principle had been established. There is strong evidence here that companies coming through the VIP lane got faster responses, were more likely to be approved, and enjoyed larger profit margins – often about 50% to 60%. They were also more likely to supply poor-quality PPE that was unusable.(To what extent particular companies did this is the subject of legal disputes and is thus not specified here, but the programme identifies an overall trend of VIP PPE being more likely to fail.)
Follow the Money is mostly a repackaging of existing reporting, but producers/directors Jenna Weiler and Davina Bristow perform that task with calm rigour. It interviews numerous campaigners – from the Good Law Project’s Jolyon Maugham to Susan Hawley, the executive director of Spotlight on Corruption – as well as journalists. As a result, the programme effectively becomes a collaboration between investigators who would normally work alone for different outlets, and whose diligence has thus, up to now, not received the attention it deserved. It pools their knowledge and adds original reporting to complete a devastating picture.
And then, just when you start to conclude that this PPE supply scandal is one of the most heinous of your lifetime … it gets worse. As the focus moved from treatment to containment, the government needed millions of those white oblong tests that once ruled all our lives. Guess what? The VIP lane opened again, with similar results. Meanwhile, British ports were clogged with containers full of PPE, because as well as paying more per unit than other countries, Britain had ordered far too many units. Some companies that had won contracts to supply PPE were later employed to dispose of it. We see a clip from the ongoing Covid inquiry, in which former health secretary Matt Hancock speaks with his trademark tone of maddeningly blase self-congratulation: asked about the several billion pounds’ worth of useless surplus PPE, he says: “We over-succeeded.”
Follow the Money is of course careful to include statements from the accused, with the companies saying that they fulfilled the terms of their contracts faithfully, and ministers and MPs saying that in the teeth of a unique crisis, they had to get PPE by any means available. Watching this programme, however, forces us to at least consider something that is almost too disgusting to contemplate: that when our country faced one of its darkest hours, certain people in charge saw not a crisis, but an opportunity.
