The British logistics company, Uniserve, was awarded Covid-19-related contracts worth around £800m in 2020, all of which were awarded without an open tender. This makes the company the largest recipient of pandemic contracts handed out by the Department of Health and Social Care without an open tender.
Uniserve last reported annual sales of £243m, says it will make tens of millions of pounds profit from £779m of contracts to supply the government with personal protective equipment (PPE) and logistics services during the coronavirus crisis. The huge scale of the contracts awarded to Uniserve without a tender has raised questions over whether the DHSC achieved the best value for the taxpayer, even within the context of the country scrambling for PPE during the height of the pandemic.
Full story in The Guardian, 18 December 2020
