A National Health Service (NHS) trust in England has spent over £50,000 awarding medals to itself for operating during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, Breitbart London can reveal.
The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which administers part of Britain’s state-owned socialised health service, revealed that it had awarded staffers 10,800 COVID-19 Medals, produced by Rhubarb Design House, following a Freedom of Information Act request.
Asked how much it had spent on COVID-19 Medals, the trust initially replied in somewhat vague terms that “the cost per medal was £2.34 plus VAT [Value Added Tax].”
Breitbart London suspected that this did not accurately reflect the medals’ true cost, and asked the trust to internally review the request and provide a fuller breakdown of expenses including any VAT, any commissioning fee, and shipping and handling fees.
Sure enough, including these additional costs took the price tag for the medals scheme to well over £50,000:
Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust said that the “[d]esign of the medal was not subject to a competitive tender process”, arguing that this “was not required under the Trust’s Standing Financial Instructions.”
In any case, they claimed that the design cost — £2,600 — ultimately came in at “less than the minimum for a competitive tender process” regardless.
They stressed that the “overall costs for these medals was covered by the Trust’s Charitable Funds Committee” — the NHS being supported with charitable donations by public-spirited individuals such as the late Captain Sir Tom Moore on top of the massive sums of taxpayer funding it is given.
Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust is not alone in awarding staff coronavirus-related medals, however, with the South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust purchasing medals of the same design as Mid Yorks, and the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust purchasing Covid Star medals made to different specifications, for example.
Breitbart London is still waiting for these trusts to provide a full breakdown of the medals’ costs.
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