A company seven weeks old with £100 in the bank won £200m of PPE contracts through the VIP lane

In the spring of 2020 the Department of Health and Social Care set up what it called a High Priority Lane. Suppliers referred by MPs, peers, ministers and senior officials went into it. Suppliers who simply offered to help through the ordinary route went into a queue that had been overwhelmed within days.

Being in the lane did not guarantee a contract, but it did guarantee that somebody would read the offer and respond to it. In a market where the government was committing billions of pounds over a matter of weeks, that was most of the battle.

The High Court ruling

In January 2022 the High Court ruled that the operation of the High Priority Lane had been unlawful. The government’s response was that the outcome would have been the same without it, which is a defence of the result rather than of the process that produced it.

PPE Medpro

PPE Medpro was referred into the lane by Baroness Michelle Mone, who contacted the Conservative peer and Cabinet Office minister Lord Agnew. The company had been incorporated seven weeks before the contract was signed and had £100 to its name. It was awarded two contracts worth more than £200m to supply personal protective equipment to the NHS.

The Public Accounts Committee examined how the awards were made. Civil litigation followed, and in 2025 the High Court ruled that PPE Medpro must repay £122m for breach of contract. The judge found that gowns manufactured in China to what were said to be European standards were not, contractually speaking, sterile, nor had they been properly validated as sterile, and could not therefore be used as sterile gowns.

They had been bought for use in operating theatres. They could not be used in operating theatres.

What the Covid-19 Inquiry established

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry published its Module 5 report on procurement in July 2026, and it explains how the lane became possible in the first place. The chair found that a lack of preparation before the pandemic had left the UK’s PPE stockpile in a perilous condition, with shortages and expired stock, and that there were no proper plans for procuring or distributing key healthcare equipment in an emergency.

The purchasing chaos of 2020 was not solely a product of panic. It was the predictable result of arriving at a foreseeable emergency with no working procedure, then improvising one under maximum time pressure with effectively unlimited money available and a group of people who knew which ministers to telephone.

Where accountability actually landed

It is worth being precise about what has and has not happened. Money has been recovered through the civil courts, by claimants who had to sue for it. The lane has been declared unlawful. A statutory inquiry has documented the failures that made it possible.

No minister has been found personally liable for any of it, and no legislation has been brought forward that would prevent an equivalent high priority lane being constructed under a different name during the next emergency.