Lovely contrast here to exactly illustrate my point, two stories on the front page of the Guardian this evening:
Documents suggest husband passed on money from PPE Medpro, which secured £200m contracts after Mone lobbied ministers
www.theguardian.com
Tory peer given large amounts of money for PPE contracts which were then siphoned off.
"Lady Mone’s support helped the company, PPE Medpro, secure a place in a “VIP lane” the government used during the coronavirus pandemic to prioritise companies that had political connections. It then secured contracts worth more than £200m.
...
The leaked documents, which were produced by the bank HSBC, appear to contradict that statement. They state that Mone’s husband, the Isle of Man-based financier Douglas Barrowman, was paid at least £65m in profits from PPE Medpro, and then distributed the funds through a series of offshore accounts, trusts and companies.
...
In September 2020, Barrowman was paid at least £65m in “profits” from the PPE deal, the HSBC report states. It states that money was transferred in two instalments to the Warren Trust, one of Barrowman’s Isle of Man trusts, using the reference “Distribution”.
From there, transfers totalling £45.8m were made to Barrowman’s personal HSBC Isle of Man bank account. That account, in turn, transferred £28.8m in October 2020 to the Keristal Trust, the beneficiaries of which, bank records indicated, were Mone and her children, the report states."
NHS heads warn patients dying every day as A&E logjams cause 169,000 hours of crew delays in worst-ever month
www.theguardian.com
"
Ambulance crews could not respond to almost one in four 999 calls last month – the most ever – because so many were tied up outside A&Es waiting to hand patients over, dramatic new
NHS figures show.
An estimated 5,000 patients in England – also the highest number on record – potentially suffered “severe harm” as a result of waiting so long either to be admitted to A&E or just to get an ambulance to turn up to help them at all.
Ambulance officers warned that patients were dying every day as a direct result of the delays because the service could no longer perform its role as a “safety net” for people needing urgent medical help.
...
“The ambulance service is in meltdown. These figures show that it is on its knees and close to collapse as a result of vacancies, underfunding, morale being at a very low ebb and demand for ambulance care having doubled to 14m calls a year since 2010,” said Rachel Harrison, the national secretary of the GMB union, which represents 15,000 staff in English ambulance services.
...
The AACE report also discloses that:
- 18% of ambulance handovers took more than an hour last month, when the NHS target is 15 minutes – a nine-fold increase on the 2% seen in October 2019.
- The average handover time was 42 minutes, up 12 minutes from October 2021 – and up 23 mins from Oct 2020.
- The number of one, two, three and 10-hour handovers was the highest ever recorded.
- Delays exposed an estimated 41,000 patients to potential harm, of whom about 5,000 were put at risk of or experienced “severe harm”, including death
