The UK stockpiled just 3% of the required level of certain items of PPE in advance of the pandemic, the chair of a leading doctors’ union told the Covid inquiry today.
Professor Philip Banfield, who chairs the council of the British Medical Association (BMA), said: “The reality was that there was a conscious decision to reduce stockpiles since 2009… so the stockpiles were, [to] my understanding, about 3% of what they were, or should have been planned for.”
Banfield’s evidence reflects a National Audit Office report from November 2020. In April 2020, the report said, the UK had a central stockpile of just 3% of the estimated daily number of gowns it needed to protect health and social care workers.
