A former nurse and her husband who were paid almost £1.85billion for PPE during the pandemic have bought themselves a fabulous Caribbean villa for £30million.
Before that, Sarah and Richard Stoute bought a country mansion in the south of England for well over £6million.
The couple, whose firm made a profit of less than £1million a year before the pandemic, have insisted they are not Covid profiteers.
They say they simply run a well-placed business and used their know-how to secure giant orders for masks, gloves and other medical-grade protection equipment before coronavirus hit the UK.
In the year before the pandemic, Mr Stoute, 51, and his 48-year-old wife jointly took £300,000 in dividends out of their 20-year-old company, Full Support Healthcare.
Now they are by far the biggest beneficiaries of the NHS’s expenditure on personal protective equipment.
Richard (left) and Sarah (right) Stoute, whose firm made a profit of less than £1million a year before the pandemic, have insisted they are not Covid profiteers
In 2020 alone, the firm – which lists just 26 employees in its latest accounts – took more than one-tenth of the NHS’s total £15billion PPE spend, twice as much as the next nearest beneficiary, which is a much larger company.
While there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing or question mark over the quality of Full Support Healthcare’s supplies, they are likely to have made tens of millions in profit from taxpayers’ money – and are now far from reluctant in spending it.
A source close to the couple told the Daily Mail: ‘When they’re in the Caribbean, they love showing off the £1million-plus yacht they got thrown in with the villa, taking guests out for trips.
‘We knew they’d made a lot of money, but now they’re spending it like EuroMillions jackpot winners.’ They are, though, a little more shy when it comes to showing off their incredible new homes.
Despite enjoying their massive windfall – and having previously bought a luxury car complete with personalised number plates displaying their name – the Stoutes are desperate to stop the public who funded their wealth knowing about their staggering property empire.
After the Daily Mail approached the couple, they hired heavy-hitting lawyers including a QC to threaten an injunction to stop details about the sprawling houses being revealed, on the grounds of ‘security’.
Another source said: ‘They’re saying now they don’t want anyone to know about their place in the Caribbean, and didn’t even want people to know which island it is, when one of the first things they bought was a Bentley with personalised plates saying ‘Stoute’.
‘They only stopped using them when it was pointed out that it gave away their identity.’
The Stoutes’ first major purchase, in the south of England, was a newly built country mansion surrounded by sprawling acres.
It was previously advertised at about half the £6million-plus the couple paid for it within just a few months of the pandemic starting. Then late last year, the couple bought their huge villa on the coast of the paradise island.
The couple, horseriding enthusiasts, have also bought the College Equestrian Centre in Keysoe, Bedfordshire, and plan to use it to help train future stars to compete in the Olympics. At the last count, they owned seven horses.
The couple have bought themselves a fabulous Caribbean villa for £30million
The couple, horseriding enthusiasts, have also bought the College Equestrian Centre in Keysoe, Bedfordshire, and plan to use it to help train future stars to compete in the Olympics
Mrs Stoute was first inspired to become a nurse by childhood visits to University College London Hospital, telling a journalist before her astonishing windfall: ‘I remember watching the nurses, all dressed in their black capes with red lining and beautiful hats, thinking they looked like angels.
‘Even from those early days, I knew I wanted to be like them, which I’m sure influenced my entering into the healthcare profession.’
After working as a nurse, she moved to medical and cleaning supplies firm Kimberley Clarke, then set up her own firm, Full Support Healthcare, in 2002, based in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.
Mrs Stoute, the chief executive, is the driving force behind the company, which she jointly owns with her husband. So she had long experience of providing specialist equipment for use inside hospital operating theatres.
In the year to March 2019, Full Support Healthcare’s profit was £808,782, and that had risen to £1,185,000 the following year. There were 26 employees. The firm has now extended its accounting period, so has not filed accounts for the year to March 2021.
But Full Support Healthcare has become by far Britain’s largest supplier of personal protective equipment including medical grade masks, surgical gowns, and plastic gloves.
Mrs Stoute said she acted fast even before news of the threat from the virus began to spread in early 2020 – revealing she had a ‘tip-off’ about the danger it posed at the end of 2019.
Despite having only limited access to funds, she put in huge advance orders for PPE to Chinese suppliers – certain that the British Government would soon need previously unheard of quantities of masks, gloves and overalls. They made their move before prices rose.
Mrs Stoute said of her firm’s huge success in the pandemic: ‘We knew the items that would be required and commissioned them for immediate production, ensuring we were first in line for delivery.
‘This ensured access to the significant supplies that would be needed in the UK and around the world with the shortest possible delivery times. We were thus able to deliver in as timely a way as possible and this undoubtedly saved lives.
‘By doing what our company is there to do, we were able to supply the NHS and other key services with high-quality and reliable PPE at the time of greatest need.’
She said that in the first few months after the Covid-19 crisis began two years ago she worked seven days a week and was getting just three hours of sleep a night. Her daughter was among new staff hired to work on the orders.
Mrs Stoute has pointed out that unlike other firms which secured lesser but still huge PPE orders, hers had 20 years’ expertise in the field. The firm has also made donations of PPE worth millions, and provided free delivery to schools or care homes needing help.
In evidence to the Commons public accounts committee last May, Mrs Stoute told how the firm’s sales totalled £10million in 2019, before shooting straight up to almost £1.85billion the next year.
‘Yes, it is a massive jump, from £10million to nearly £2billion,’ she said.
But she said that when the virus hit the NHS was slow to place big PPE orders. Things only improved after ‘senior officials’ in the Department of Health and Social Care contacted her firm directly to ‘get the wheels moving’.
Asked what bonuses she and her husband paid themselves after their bumper year, Mrs Stoute said: ‘I have no financial information at this stage’.
A spokesman for the department has said of the sum the Stoutes were paid: ‘Proper due diligence is carried out for all government contracts and we take these checks extremely seriously. We have a robust process in place that ensures orders are high quality and meet strict safety standards.’
The spokesman added that a special framework agreement with Full Support Healthcare dating back some five years meant details about what it has been paid for, and the value for money provided, do not have to be published.
The National Audit Office has said that it is concerned about the many billions paid out for PPE.
In 2019, the NHS spent a total of £146million on PPE. In the first year of the virus from March 2020, that sum rocketed more than a hundred-fold, to £15bn.
In 2019, disposable gowns cost the NHS an average of just 33p each. During the pandemic, that typically rocketed 13-fold to £4.50. Plastic gloves rose from 2p to 12p, masks from 11p each to 40p and disposable aprons from 2p to 5p.
And figures published by the National Audit Office show these more expensive PPE supplies were bought in undreamt of volumes.
The amount of masks bought by the NHS during the pandemic, for example, rose from previous levels by 130,000 per cent.
After Full Support Healthcare, the next biggest recipient of taxpayers’ cash for PPE is believed to have received less than half the sum paid to it.
Uniserve, part of a group with more than 700 workers, was reported to have been paid £777million. It generated a profit before tax of £46.4million for the 15-month period to June 2020, compared with £6.4million the year before, showing how the pandemic turbo-charge the fortunes of the company.
Mrs Stoute, meanwhile, made clear in an interview pre-virus that she most certainly did not succeed by selling masks and surgical gowns cheaply. She revealed: ‘We never sell on price – we sell on education, safety and expertise.’
