When Mrs Justice Cockerill handed down her judgment in the high court against PPE Medpro, the company linked to the Conservative peer Michelle Mone, for supplying unsafe personal protective equipment during the Covid crisis, her findings were a landmark in a five-year saga that cast the opaque world of government deal-making into stark light.
PPE Medpro was ordered to refund the full £122m that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) paid for unusable gowns in the summer of 2020, as Boris Johnson’s government scrambled to refill the UK’s depleted stocks.
But Cockerill’s 87-page judgment also offered an intriguing glimpse into another company whose contracts, with a combined value of £1.4bn, dwarfed the PPE Medpro deals, a firm so much less well-known that even a politician involved in the deals could not remember its name.
To people familiar with the frantic multibillion-pound spending of public money and the “VIP lane” for politically connected companies seeking PPE contracts, it was jolting that Cockerill found this firm was also at fault in the supply of unusable PPE. Its name is Uniserve.
In her judgment, Cockerill concluded that the contract with Uniserve required them to inspect the PPE Medpro gowns in China, before they were shipped. She said there was a “degree of doubt” about whether Uniserve ever did conduct inspections. Whatever process was followed, it failed to spot the glaring fault with the gowns’ technical labelling, which indicated they were not certified to be sterile.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/08/billion-pound-ppe-contractor-uniserve-tory-mp