The Prime Minister hoped that it would be “world-beating“, but it turns out that England’s test and trace system has met none of its key targets despite its £22 billion price tag. Not exactly money well spent! Parliament’s spending watchdog has concluded that there is no evidence the Government’s programme contributed to a reduction in Covid infection levels. The Guardian has the story.
In a report which examined the rush to invest in the scheme, the cross-party public accounts committee has challenged ministers to justify the “staggering investment of taxpayers’ money” and criticised the use of private consultants who are paid up to £6,624 a day.
The programme, which has a budget that exceeds that of the Department for Transport, is run by Dido Harding, who was appointed by Matt Hancock, last year…
The timing of the report’s conclusions is an embarrassment for the Government as it continues to refuse to give a pay increase of more than 1% to health workers.
Ministers had justified the vast expenditure on preventing a second national lockdown, but – questioning the programme’s effectiveness – MPs who compiled the report noted that England is now living under its third.
Meg Hillier, the chair of the committee, said the enormous amounts spent on the scheme leaves the impression that the public purse has been used like a cashpoint.
“Despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project, test and trace cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic, and the promise on which this huge expense was justified – avoiding another lockdown – has been broken, twice,” she said. “British taxpayers cannot be treated by the Government like an ATM machine. We need to see a clear plan and costs better controlled.”
This is not the first report to highlight the failures of test and trace. In December, the National Audit Office found that only as high as 38% of those tested for Covid received their results within 24 hours, with a low of 14% in October, falling far short of the Government’s target. Perhaps more money will solve the problem…
Worth reading in full.
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If you have a cold then stay at home
asymptomatic transmission is largely a myth pushed by the testing companies
I am mystified why people get tested. When I was unwell I self isolated and got an antibody test 3 weeks later from a finger prick as it was negative I will get the vaccine.
Hire: Dido Harding. Result: disaster.
I rest my case mi’lud.
That’s only like 700 quid from every single employed person in the UK. No biggie, right? Especially since you weren’t planning on going on holiday either way, right?
Its key performance indicator was successful in that it took lots of borrowed money and made some individuals extremely wealthy. Same as HS2
You took the words right out of my mouth.
World-beating on cost?
The 2011 Influenza PAndemic Prep. Plan predicted mass testing was a waste of resources and recommended against it (and general masking & quarantining the well). Once SAGE abandoned this plan a T & T system was inevitable. But what I fear will happen is that Parliament will say “Look at S. Korea etc” so what we need next time is better T & T and better lockdown.
Thirty-seven billion pounds is the current cost of the wealth transfer scheme known as Test and Trace.
We will test them on the beaches, we will test them on the landing grounds, we will test them in the fields; we will never stop testing until we find enough “positive?” tests and force the Bozzer to order more and more lockdowns.
With profound and heartfelt apologies to Winston Churchill and his descendants.
If this was HST2 you would have a rough idea of spend -land, track, signalling , wages etc .
Where is the money going here? No land , big wages -but what else?
Local Authorities ran (and still do) Test and Trace systems very successfully for very many years, via (usually) the Environmental Health service working in conjunction with the Communicable Disease control section of Public Health. Principally concerning food poisoning and water bourne outbreaks, of course. Locally based, with local knowledge, able to respond swiftly and with powers under the Public Health Act, Food Safety Act, Health and Safety at Work (etc) Act and numerous others. These well established systems, with well trained and knowledgeable staff, would have been far better placed to follow up on COVID infections, albeit would have needed increased resourcing.
And yet rather than doing this, our Government set up something from scratch, using Excel spreadsheets to record the results, for goodness sake, and that was clearly not fit for purpose right from the start.
Incompetence, Ignorance or corruption? Or all three.
The tip of the iceberg as far as the mishandling of this entire thing. And still ongoing with the incessant fear mongering and the pushing of vaccines.
It really is criminal.
There is a world of difference between ‘Test & Trace’ for incidental outbreaks of disease and dealing with an epidemic (or near-epidemic) viral outreak.
All the main planks of the government response :
… were all rejected in pre-2020 strategy documents.
Doh! What was that Einstein definition of insanity?
I’m with that Telegraph article — while Test and Trace was certainly implemented incompetently in the UK, it was never going to really work without the kind of surveillance state seen in South Korea (and which the people there likely only accepted because their society had become militarized in the face of the North Korean threat).