Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of civil servants working on procurement of personal protective equipment for (a) the NHS, (b) social care settings and (c) workplaces where employees are required to be physically present for work during the covid-19 outbreak.

As set out in the ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19): personal protective equipment (PPE) plan’ published on 10 April, we have taken a centralised approach to the procurement of PPE, to limit the potential for different parts of the health and social care sector to compete against each other and push prices up further

The Government has set up a cross-Government PPE sourcing unit, now staffed by over 400 people, to secure new supply lines from across the world and has published rigorous standards against which purchases will be made.