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2023-Simon Oldham

Revealing the role of valuation in responsible crisis management: An analysis of the UK government’s Covid-19 Personal Protective Equipment procurement practice

Dr Simon Oldham (PI), Royal Holloway University of London; and Dr Laura Spence (Co-I), Royal Holloway University of London – Revealing the role of valuation in responsible crisis management: An analysis of the UK government’s Covid-19 Personal Protective Equipment procurement practice

Grant Ref: 2023-364-T1

Grant Amount: £3,505

Project summary: To date 75% of the £12 billion spent on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic by the Department for Health and Social Care has been written off, including over £4 billion worth of goods disposed of by burning (House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, 2022). Management and governance of these procurement processes are subject to ongoing investigations; however it is already clear from interim reports and journalists’ work that both ethical and commercial failings were woven into the procurement practices of public sector bodies. We see this as a failure of valuation, which resulted in poor quality PPE purchased at inflated prices from suppliers. These practices demonstrate clear failings in governance, such as a ‘High Priority Lane’ subsequently deemed unlawful by the High Court and purchases from suppliers subject to allegations of Modern Slavery (House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, 2022). This resulted in significant losses to the public purse and social and environmental costs alongside the extraction of substantial profits for a handful of private sector suppliers. As part of the pandemic recovery process, this project seeks to understand how the governance context and specific decisions made not only enabled but in many cases even legitimised such poor value attribution. In this project we shed light on how abandonment of valuation practices normally embedded within procurement processes, constitutive of values including due diligence and open tendering, led to such poor value attribution and thus sub-optimal outcomes.