PPE Medpro: a £200m contract, and a £122m court judgment against it
PPE Medpro's contract was worth £200m. A High Court judgment (Oct 2025) has ordered £121,999,219 of it repaid — 61% of the original value. Whether it's actually collected from a company in administration is a separate, unresolved question.
The claim
PPE Medpro made millions from a failed pandemic PPE contract, and nothing has actually been done about it.
What is true
PPE Medpro's gowns genuinely failed sterility/certification requirements, and a company linked to a Conservative peer profited substantially from a pandemic-era government contract awarded via the "VIP lane" — that part is true, serious, and not in dispute.
Put it in scale
What we know / don’t know
Will DHSC actually recover the £122m, given PPE Medpro is in administration?
A court judgment establishes what is owed; it does not guarantee what an insolvent company can actually pay. Administrators (Interpath Advisory) have separately launched their own civil suit against named individuals and companies to recover money for creditors — a different, ongoing process from the judgment itself.
Will HMRC's separate £39m tax claim be paid?
HMRC has lodged a claim for roughly £39m in tax as a creditor in the PPE Medpro administration, per the administrators' own November 2025 proposal report. This is a live, disputed claim inside insolvency proceedings, not a final or confirmed tax assessment — deliberately not used as a headline metric on this card for that reason.
The verdict
A £122m court judgment against PPE Medpro is real. Whether it is actually recovered from a company in administration is not yet known.
Every number on this card
| Figure | What it counts | Geography · period | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £200m | Original PPE Medpro contract value (two DHSC contracts, June 2020)The DHSC contract documents themselves are the primary record; hosted here via Tax Policy Associates, which reproduced them in its own reporting. | United Kingdom · June 2020 | KNOWN | DHSC PPE contract documents |
| £121,999,219 | High Court judgment ordering PPE Medpro to repay DHSCA separate figure, £133,577,920.20 plus interest, appears in PPE Medpro's own company accounts — likely reflecting accrued interest or a different accounting-date snapshot of the same underlying liability. The £121,999,219 figure used here is the court-ordered sum as reported at judgment. | United Kingdom · Judgment made public 1 October 2025 | KNOWN | High Court (Cockerill J), DHSC v PPE Medpro breach-of-contract judgment |
| 61% | Share of the original contract value the court has ordered repaid | United Kingdom · As at judgment, October 2025 | CALCULATED | Calculated from the two OBSERVED_OFFICIAL figures above |
- This card deliberately excludes PPE Medpro's reported £65m profit and HMRC's £39m tax claim as headline metrics — both are real and reported, but neither is a court-confirmed or final figure the way the £121,999,219 judgment is.
- Criminal investigation (National Crime Agency, ongoing since 2021, into possible fraud, bribery and false representation) is separate from both this civil judgment and the tax claim — no charges have been brought, and this card makes no claim about that investigation's outcome.
Verified against primary sources: 2026-09-15.