A series of social media posts have drawn attention to a Home Office procurement tender to obtain “mortuary equipment and supplies” for a major incident which causes mass fatalities.
Social media users shared screenshots of the tender. One asked “why” the Government is preparing for a mass fatality event. Another said: “I thought it was a conspiracy theory, but I have found the Home Office link.”
Another asked “what exactly are they expecting?” while a fourth poster said “this requires a detailed explanation! Government doesn’t obtain a morgue of this magnitude, unless it’s preparing for a mass death event”.
Some went further. One poster wrote: “A little clue as to what they have in store for us.” Another said: “I have been saying for a while the government is planning a major event to incite civil unrest.”
Evaluation
This contract is part of routine planning from the Government in order to ensure it is prepared should an unexpected event leave hundreds of people dead. It replaces a similar system which has been in place for 20 years.
The facts
The contract
The procurement tender that the online claims are based on is real and split into different parts. The Government has indeed tendered for a “mass fatality capability resilience storage framework”.
“In the event of a major incident resulting in a large number of fatalities which could overwhelm existing body storage capacity the Home Office would provide contingency support to the requesting local authority,” the description of the tender said.
It also said that it was being sought to “replace its current capability” with something more efficient.
In a document attached to the procurement it adds: “As the current capability (is) approaching the end of its serviceable life, the Home Office is looking to replacing its mass fatalities body storage capability.”
It adds that the mass fatalities capability “is long-standing” and has “existed in many forms while under HO (Home Office) stewardship”.
In a statement to the PA news agency the Home Office reiterated this fact. It said that the new contract is designed to replace a now two-decade-old system.
“This contract seeks to update a capability that has existed since 2005, and which has been maintained under all governments in that period,” the Home Office said.
“It is a procurement process that began under the previous government in 2023.”
The historical contract
The Home Office’s answer is borne out by the facts. The same Government online contracts portal to which the social media posters referred contains a page for a 2006 contract entitled National Emergency Mortuary Arrangement (Nema).
The Nema contract pre-dated the online contracts finder, so the page only contains a small amount of information. However a Freedom Of Information request from 2006 has more detail.
This shows that in 2005 and 2006 the Home Office procured a capacity for so-called National Emergency Mortuary Arrangements (Nema). These “aimed to put in place national arrangements for an emergency mortuary as part of the response to a mass fatality incident”.
The requirement in the procurement tender that the Home Office gave to potential suppliers “was for the provision of temporary structures to serve as an emergency mortuary”.
All this can currently be seen on the Government’s website, and was published in 2006.
Further evidence of Nema can be found on non-Government websites too. In a 2015 article about how London plans to cope with potential future terror attacks, US magazine Newsweek referred to Nema.
It is “a tented system that can be set up as one 600-body morgue or two 300-body facilities”, the Newsweek article said.
Links
Post on X (archived)
Second post on X (archived)
Third post on X (archived)
Fourth post on X (archived)
Fifth post on X (archived)
Sixth post on X (archived)
Gov.uk Contracts Finder – Mass Fatalities Resilience Capability – Lot 2 (archived)
Gov.uk Contracts Finder – Mass Fatalities Resilience Capability – Lot 3(archived)
Gov.uk Contracts Finder – Appendix B – Statement of Requirements (archived)
Gov.uk Contracts Finder – National Emergency Mortuary Arrangement (archived)
Gov.uk – National Emergency Mortuary Arrangement Procurement FOI release (archived)
Gov.uk – Procurement of National Emergency Mortuary Arrangements: Overview report (archived)
London’s Terror Protocols: The Plan for the Next Terrorism Attack (archived)
