Ministers spent an eye-watering £26.5million of taxpayers’ money on private consultancy and legal costs relating to Covid PPE.
Officials have been desperate to recover funds wasted on useless personal protective equipment (PPE).
Previous estimates had put the figure of legal fees at around £1million.
However Health Minister Will Quince revealed the true costs, which are from April 2020 to now, in a parliamentary question asked by Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner.
Almost £15billion has been wasted by the Department of Health on PPE, Covid tests and medicines that will not be used, Whitehall's spending watchdog found in January.
Ministers wasted money on products that were overpriced, unusable or out-of-date.
Some Covid-19 protective gear has been burnt to get rid of it.
Last year the Public Accounts Committee warned that £4billion of unsuitable PPE was set to be destroyed.
Ms Rayner said: “Families up and down the country will be sickened to learn of the millions of pounds of their hard-earned taxes spent lining the pockets of eye-wateringly expensive consultants, hired to tell the Government how to do their own jobs.
"And to add insult to injury, much of this PPE is literally going up in flames as the Government’s bonfire of useless gowns, gloves and goggles grows.
“Rather than investing in the skills, talent and value for money of the civil service, this government has become hooked on expensive private consultants and they’re using taxpayers’ money to feed their spiralling addiction.
“Ministers must look again at these contracts and ask why consultants were being paid thousands of pounds an hour to dole out advice.
"Rather than calling on expensive management consultancy at every turn, a Labour Government would use and develop our own civil service, claw back wasted money and respect every penny of taxpayers' cash.”
When it emerged that almost £15billion had been wasted on unusable Covid products, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: "The Conservatives can never again claim to be the careful stewards of the public finances.
"While Rishi Sunak had control of the purse strings, a staggering £15 billion of public money was wasted on useless PPE - enough to fund the police force for an entire year.
"Instead, that money is now literally going up in smoke.
"Taxpayers will rightly judge the carelessness with which the Conservatives treat their money to be an absolute scandal."
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “The use of consultants on major government projects is standard practice and they offer specific expertise. Consultancy numbers fluctuate based on services and deliverables required at any given time.
“In the face of an unprecedented pandemic, we had to compete in an overheated global market to procure items to protect the public, frontline health and care workers and our NHS.
“Our approach meant that we were the first country in the world to deploy an approved Covid vaccine, with 144 million doses administered, and we delivered over 25 billion items of PPE to the frontline.”
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