The UK government appears unlikely to recover any money from a healthcare recruitment agency that allegedly failed to deliver on a multimillion-pound PPE contract awarded during the Covid pandemic, reports The Guardian. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has confirmed it is in a dispute over the £20 million-plus contract awarded to SG Recruitment UK Ltd. However, the agency’s parent company, a Jersey-based company, has gone into liquidation, raising questions about whether the government can recoup any funds.

SG Recruitment was granted its first contract in April 2020, only five days after it was referred to the government’s fast-track “VIP lane”, following an introduction by the Conservative peer Lord Chadlington, whose real name is Peter Gummer, a Conservative grandee appointed to the House of Lords in 1996. A month later the agency, which has since been renamed, was awarded a second multimillion-pound contract. Chadlington was a director and shareholder of SGH (Sumner Group Holdings), the parent company. After an inquiry last year, the Lords commissioner for standards cleared Chadlington of breaching a prohibition against peers using their position to financially benefit themselves or lobby for companies in which they have an interest.

Doubts over the PPE that SG Recruitment supplied first surfaced in February last year, when the Department said £26 million-worth of the company’s products had been marked ‘do not supply’. In response, a spokesperson for SGH told the Guardian that the goods supplied were fit for purpose and the company was not in dispute with the government.

The Department has recently stated that ‘commercial discussions’ were continuing on 58 PPE contracts it says were breached or failed to meet required standards, and that £1.6 billion in public money was ‘at risk’ from such contracts. A Department spokesperson said there was ‘a compelling public interest’ in maintaining confidentiality over these contracts, where they had a disagreement and there remained the potential for legal action. This stance means the taxpayer is left in the dark about government actions to recover these funds. It also means the DHSC will not provide details about the 58 contracts in dispute nor the companies involved.