LONDON, July 25 (EFE) – British taxpayers will have to pay their country’s debts for “decades” to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences, according to a report by a British parliamentary committee released on Sunday.
The study by the influential Public Accounts Committee concluded that CEO Boris Johnson’s response to the pandemic will carry “significant financial risks” to state coffers for decades to come.
Lawmakers estimate that government measures amounted to spending of 372 billion pounds (434 billion euros) in May, bringing the debt to 2.2 trillion pounds (2.6 million pounds), or 99.7% of GDP.
“While we recognize that the usual rules on big spending decisions need to be loosened…we are concerned that this has created significant risks that must be addressed over the years,” the committee members wrote in the presence of Conservatives and Labor. and the Liberal Democrats.
The chair of the committee, Labor Party Meg Heller, called on the government to be “clear” about how it intends to tackle this and in what period of time.
The report indicated that about 26 thousand million pounds (30 thousand million euros) used to save the economy will be lost as a result of fraud and the inability of some companies to repay loans.
The committee issued a second parallel report in which it denounced the “unacceptably high” levels of money wasted in purchasing personal protective equipment against the virus, as the state spent more than 10 billion pounds (11.7 billion pounds). euros).
The commission found that of the more than 32,000 million PPE ordered by the Ministry of Health, only 11,000 million have been distributed, while another 12,600 are in stock. Moreover, another 8.4 billion pieces of PPE purchased from other countries did not even reach the UK.
A total of 2,100 million pieces of PPE obtained at a cost of more than 2,000 million pounds (23,400 million euros) have proven useless, although the CEO defends that it is only a tiny fraction of the materials for all teams. EFE
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