Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant has claimed that his father died “very unnecessarily” due to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) shortages during the Covid pandemic.

Patrick, 51, opened up about his father, James, who died aged 79 in March 2020.

Speaking to Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs, he said: “My dad died of Covid very, very early on, very unnecessarily, because there was no PPE in the hospital.

“He’d gone into hospital (in March 2020) for a pretty routine operation, caught Covid in hospital and died three days later.”

Before adding: “(I) remember (talking) to somebody in the Cabinet Office, I went to them early on and said look, ‘There are loads and loads people who can sew at home. We’ve got very limited sewing capacity in the UK but hospitals need scrubs and gowns’.”

“‘There are a million sewing machines in homes around the UK, lots of them want to help, there are lots of also empty factories with cutting capacity, we can get the fabric, we can cut it centrally, distribute it to home sewers’.

“They (the Cabinet Office) said: ‘Oh health and safety, we wouldn’t’ and I’m like ‘it’s a pair of scrubs like there are doctors wearing pajamas’… (They said) ‘We would have to sign off every individual sewer through health and safety’. I was like ‘You’ve all lost your minds’.”

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Desert Island Discs asks guests to share eight tracks, a book, and a luxury item that they would want with them if they were stranded on a desert island.

When talking about his father, Patrick chose the track Get Better by Alt-J, which he said was about “struggling with the loss of a loved one.”

He said: “It’s a beautiful song. Of course, it brings back memories of my dad and it’s also, it’s kind of uplifting because we will get through.”

Patrick has been a judge alongside Esme Young on the Great British Sewing Bee since it started in 2013.

In 2016, he launched Community Clothing a social enterprise that makes affordable, ethical clothing whilst supporting UK textile jobs.

Patrick’s episode on Desert Island Discs will air on BBC Radio 4 at 11.15 am on Sunday, October 22.