Norpig wrote:I know Sluffy will claim this is all above board but it just smacks of complete incompetence at the highest level of the civil service.
It really isn't like that at all.
Forget all the political hype and think of it a bit like buying a house when there is a property boom on.
You want to buy a house next door to your granny say and when your granny bought hers it cost hardly anything compared to todays house values - but house prices are going up every day and you have to buy now or it will be soon outside what you can afford - so you go to your bank get the biggest loan you can get and buy it - good for you.
But the next day the property market crashes, house prices fall off a cliff and the house at the other side to your granny comes up for sale and is sold for a fraction for what you have recently paid for yours.
You are in negative equity, having to pay for a house that is now worth very much less than you could sell it for.
You're now stuck with it.
That's basically what has happened to the government and every other government in the world - it isn't just us you know - bought at the top of the market and the market has now collapsed - so if you like the kit we have in stock is now negative equity - and all the government is saying is that if 'we' sold it now, we wouldn't get our money back, so they are 'writing' the stock value down to the current market prices - that's what most of this is about.
What was the alternative - that we didn't buy any PPE when the pandemic was on because it was too expensive? Of course we had to pay the going rate at the time - no one can be blamed for doing that can they?
Did we buy too much PPE - yes it seems we did - but so did every other country too - no one knew how long this thing would be a killer and as long as it needed to be dealt with, the NHS had to have the PPE available in stock.
Nobody would making this an issue now if we were still having thousands of people dead and dying from Covid each day from Covid and the NHS stretched to capacity and the country having to go into repeated lockdowns to save it from collapsing would we? Things changed though we invented a vaccine and killer Covid has turned into a common cold like Covid called Omicron instead.
Did we buy some dud kit - yes we did, mistakes were made due to the rush to acquire PPE from anywhere but those mistakes accounted for only 3% of all the PPE stock purchased.
Do you think 97% of things done right is quite an achievement in the face of a worldwide pandemic with every country in the world trying to get their hands on PPE?
It seems amazingly good to me (almost too good to be true to be honest).
But the ONS, PAC and the JR judge have all been provided with evidence during their various individual inquiries and investigations to date that this percentage is in fact true.
I may as well chuck in here that the same people making all this an issue in the public eye are the same ones telling us all about this mountain of sleaze, cronyism and corruption that has supposedly happened - yet now TWO YEARS from all this kicking off - not one shred of hard evidence has ever been found.
I wonder why that is?
Might it be because all of it didn't really happen and might the story here really be that 97% of PPE bought during fierce worldwide competition during the pandemic is perfect rather than 3% wasn't?