A recent report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has concluded that the Test and Trace scheme, implemented to track and control the spread of Covid, failed in its original purpose at a cost of £37 billion to the taxpayer. Of the 2,000 consultants hired to manage the scheme, it has been uncovered that no more than 50% were working directly on the Test and Trace project at any time, with one call handler claiming to have received £4,500 without picking up the phone once. The Telegraph has the story.
MPs said billions had been squandered on a failed promise to “enable people to return towards a more normal way of life”, that instead saw two national lockdowns and a rise in case numbers.
The excoriating report, published just before the Chancellor sets out details of a £5.9 billion funding boost for the NHS, details a host of missed targets and a lack of control over spending on consultants…
The publication marks a major blow for a programme, which was championed by then Health Secretary Matt Hancock and hailed by Boris Johnson as “world-beating”.
When it was launched last May, Hancock said it would enable the Government to replace national lockdowns with “individual isolation” for contacts of Covid cases.
Dame Meg Hillier, Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “The national Test & Trace programme was allocated eye-watering sums of taxpayers’ money in the midst of a global health and economic crisis.”
“It set out bold ambitions but has failed to achieve them despite the vast sums thrown at it”.
The report shows how the performance of the system deteriorated just when it was needed most, despite spare capacity in laboratories. Meanwhile, less than half of the contact tracing staff hired were ever in use at any one time.
While the country was in lockdown in February, just 11% of contact tracers were working.
Worth reading in full.
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What do you mean, a failure? It was a raging success. Follow the money. One or two have creamed it for doing Fanny Adams.
No sh*t, Sherlock!
Imagine throwing away or trying to spend over £100m a day for a year. Guess you dont have to now as our ‘leaders’ have shown by example.
No problem though as the global private banking elite are more than happy to loan as much as is deemed necessary to enslave future generations in debt tax repayment.
“NHS Test and Trace Was a £37 Billion Failure”
No shit, Sherlock! Some of us worked that out when it started.
A “successful” transfer of wealth from the productive makers to the unproductive takers.
Perhaps there should also be a watch on Local Authorities too. Our Council (with 256,000 citizens) has had £136.3 Million in Covid related funding over 14 months. I do hope they’re keeping a proper audit trail on this taxpayer cash. Will be very interesting to see where it all went.
Some went on sending residents instruction manuals explaining how to stay indoors.
4 & 1/2 grand not to answer the phone once?! Maybe it was a scumbag MP moonlighting whilst ‘working from home’…
Baroness Dido Harding ..married to John Penrose MP for Weston-super-mare, and HMGs Anti corruption champion..
Then there is Dame Catherine Bingham..married to Jesse Norman MP Financial Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2021 and as the Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire since 2010.
You couldn’t make this shit up..I guess you have to be in it to win it..
The revolving door Chumocracy for you…
Predators track and trace
Anyone else getting a 502 Bad Gateway error message when moving around the site ?
This sometimes happens for a minute or two if they are loading a new article but it’s been happening on and off for 45 minutes now.
Yes
Perhaps they took a while getting the German Xmas Market page up?
Nah, but they were being rude to me the other day, calling me a nonce.
Not just the £37 billion but countless billions in lost productivity with healthy people stuck at home doing nothing
And of course that loss productivity includes many thousands of NHS employees who were either moved off frontline roles or sent home because there were ‘vulnerable’, or had to isolate due to tests or being pinged. That can’t have helped the NHS cope with its workload.
Given the % of Wah!NHS employees engaged in non productive paper chasing, it didn’t make a huge difference.
It is the refusal of Wah!NHS staff to see potential patients, conduct screening, surgery and treatment that has caused so many extra deaths.
Funny that those nasty systems in continental europe, japan etc didn’t have the same problems.
As I have being saying for the past 15 months the real top story is the mass murder of tens of thousands in the care homes
I suspect the truth about this will only start to come out as some of the civil cases come to court. This is likely to be many years down the line
For those who haven’t seen it, what did bozo say to catch the interviewer off guard?
Doesn’t play, what did he say?
Here’s the vid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LkZEZA7PDY
It’s him suggesting “feeding some of the human beings to the animals”. Maybe the magnitude of the crimes that he is involved in are starting to cause a breakdown.
Correct, in response to the interviewer asking about declining wild biomass.
Not a new idea; thoroughly recommend you scope “Soylent Green”, Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson in his last film role, if I remember correctly. For a film made 45+ years ago, it was well ahead of its time.
It might be art imitating life if Bozo has his way.
Funny with all this tracking and tracing they never mentioned that all of it led back to western funded gain of function research in Wuhan.
Well, there’s a shocker!! As an IT professional and ex programmer. I’d have said a couple of grand was way over the top for this app. I can knock an app out in PowerApps in a couple of days that would do the same thing.
Lots of questions need to be asked and Ms Dildo, sorry Dido should be jailed. We would be.
Don’t we mean a “world beating” failure!
“World cheating failure”
I’d be very surprised if much of this was actually spent on Test & Trace. The cynic in me thinks it was actually spent developing the Digital ID/Heath/Freedom Pass technologies, with a large pot reserved for funding the BI “Nudge” Units work over the coming year.
Test and Trace wasn’t supposed to work on its own terms, just as the Nightingale hospitals were never intended to be used. Both were props for the National Sickness Theatre. But if the return on investment were to be measured on compliance, every one of those £37 billion was well spent. Test and Trace has habituated millions of people to an app-driven, health-status-dependent mode of social existence and has prepared the ground for vaccine passports.
I was going to point out that it depends on what it was really intended for but you’ve said it so much better than I could.
As you say, friends, family and I all thought it was a pilot study for a check-point Charlie society.
We didn’t down-load it and doubted many did. It was claimed high numbers had, but numbers are a bit ‘variable’ depending on what government wants at the time
FFS … absolutely fecking incredible.
This is well worth the read.
“We have been sold a fantasy designed to rope us into a pharmaceutical dependency as a deceitful trade-off for access to our lives”
https://brownstone.org/articles/your-booster-life-how-big-pharma-adopted-the-subscription-model-of-profitability/
Reading it now – at the start it says “By now it is abundantly clear from the epidemiological data that the vaccinated are able to both catch and spread the disease.” But it’s worth noting the science always knew these vaccines were leaky and would allow transmission. This has always been known, so the governments would have known they would allow transmission before the first jab was given. An important point for the prosecution at the war crimes trials.
The basis that it lowers symptoms is iffy as well.
At least in my experience. Double Jabbed acquaintances all had reactions to jabs, then felt rubbish for longer than I did after
I do not believe £37 billion was “spaffed” on Test and Trace. This is beyond ridiculous or the bulk went to line somebody’s pocket.
The figure of £37 billion suggests other more nefarious projects have been hidden and funded from within this sum, but doubtless of an AI nature.
This sort of con is standard accounting procedure where public spending is involved.
The Oliver North Arms for Contras scandal being a prime example of subversive slush funds.
TBF I think that figure was the budget – the actual spend, certainly at one time, was somewhat less.
Doesn’t make it taste any better though, does it?
In Germany T&T was done by local health office employees. They, did take on extra staff for that and commissioned a computer programme which failed.
There were lots of reports of people getting letters with instructions to isolate for 2 weeks a week after the isolation period ended, which was even stated in the letter. And the letters did not get lost in the mail system, they were written after the period had ended.
But, I guess the good German civil servants has to do their job correctly, just like those T&T supervisors here reprimanding bored tracers who look out of the window for something more interesting to stare at.
Glad they’ve said this but we could have saved them whatever it cost for the PAC to come to this conclusion. This was predicted by us here when it first announced.
Yes, we)d have told the cretins to scrub it and we’d only have demanded a paltry £1000 or so a day for our consultancy services!
There is an old Russian proverb that says you can take a wolf by the ears, but you can never let go. The current regime now has the wolf, the public, by the ears ant it knows it can never let go otherwise it’s going to get what’s coming to it.
Thats a good saying, never heard jt before 😊
I’n just waiting till they do let go. I hope the wolf bloody tears their throats out.
There is another old saying that ‘you don’t need to run faster than a wolf to get away, just faster than the other person running with you’.
Excellently portrayed in the movie The Legion
(shoot your companion in the leg).
Of course it was a colossal failure. All you need to do is look to any other country which did not implement any such bollocks and fared just as well (if not better).
Well, what is to be done about this? Will the BBC, Sky, ITV and the other proganda outlets report upon this disgraceful largesse?
There is no saving grace now for Johnson. Hancock and co. They have to be prosecuted for malfeasance and disgraceful conduct in public office.
P.S. I will not be paying any Lockdown Tax and would rather stop working.
Define “Lockdown Tax”….
So pissed off with all this now. My SIL returned to the office 3 days a week last week. Colleague, double jabbed sitting behind him, daughter tested positive last week but he didn’t have to self isolate because he’s jabbed, now positive this week and quite poorly so SIL now having to self isolate for 10 days despite having covid with symptoms two months ago. All because the govt guidelines makes no allowance for natural immunity and people are still buying into this shit.
Off topic, please can I encourage as many people as possible to make large banners to display at your local cenotaph at the remembrance parade with “MPs name is a total hypocrite, he/she has removed the freedoms so many gave their lives for”
Or something similar, we need to start waking more people up and this might just jolt them.
“make large banners to display at your local cenotaph at the remembrance parade with “MPs name is a total hypocrite, he/she has removed the freedoms so many gave their lives for”
100% yes, I really love this idea.
Thanks, on the day make sure someone takes a photo and pits it on local ‘spotted’ and any other platforms to get as large an audience as possible.
I’m no longer out and about much but are people really still going along with this self isolation crap?
Are they skiving or is it management at the behest of insurance companies?
Great idea about the banners though; my MP was conspicuously absent throughout except to vote for ‘Sooner, Stronger, Longer’ for each and every lockdown measure.
Just once in the middle of this summer did he squeak up asking for an exemption for this staycation district after the hospitality trade bit his head off.
They are if there’s the risk that they’ll get a knock on the door to check they’re in, especially if unjabbed.
What a great idea – our MP is the attack dog for the “Fact checking” STASI andI have left him in no doubt what I think of his unbending support for this charade; I did think it might from a point of principle POV until he was – very recently – elevated to a position in the “levelling up” bollox department – my delusion reset in a heartbeat.
I think of all the catastrophic decisions made in the last 18 months this is one that riles me the most.
That is OUR money. Every penny needs to be accounted for and anything that was spent over and above what was reasonable for what they were buying or paying for (Im biting my tongue here as obviously none of it should have been bought or paid for) needs to be recouped.
It is an utterly insane amount of money.
In the City (sorry – I work there so its a good comparison for me) we have something called the Senior Managers Regime which basically says that if your staff do something incompetent that has a serious material affect on your firm or the markets in general, then even if it isnt illegal, you as the manager are held fully responsible and possibly go to jail.
I fail to see why politicians are not held to the same standards.
Who signed off on each expense, was it reasonable, if not pay it back (out of your own pocket if it cant be recouped) or go to jail……
Of course the politicians and high ranking civil servants should pay it back, do not use my tax money to keep them in jail! Or bring back debtors jails, they had to provide their own food and drink, clothes, and bribes for the guards.
And prostitute their loved ones to the guards for any little extras like blankets.
“needs to be recouped”
It’s automatically recouped. They don’t use Sterling anywhere else so it just bounces around until it heads back to the Exchequer as taxes. Your spending is my income less taxes. My spending is your income less taxes. And so on.
The money is irrelevant, and arguably stimulative in a depressed economy.
It’s the time wasted on the thing that can never be recouped. That’s the real loss to the country.
Although admittedly tying Dido Harding on something so she can’t make a mess of anything else is probably worth paying for.
It will be your grandchildren who will be paying it off less the amount that can be inflated away which itself will reduce the value of their assets (pass at ‘0’ level Economics C1970s tells me this).
Not mine as I don’t have any that I know about.
MMT is just so batshit insane.
It reminds me of those adjusting reality to fit the models.
Was it Barings bank that went to the wall because of the malfeasance of a single junior player?
It was indeed……..though that was where he hid the losses from his employers (though they should have noticed)
There are many examples of enormous losses racked up by relatively junior employees at banks/hedge funds/trading houses – google London Whale for one such example. Even though none were necessarily illegal, thats why the regulators brought in the regime to force senior managers to take a much more ‘hands on’ approach to supervising their staff.
Its amazing how the threat of a huge personal fine and/or jail time focusses the attention……
Well, at least one parliamentary committee comes up with the goods.
What is probably not there is the fact that ‘Test & Trace’ was bound to fail in this situation of a widespread infection. It was a stupid idea that had been stamped on by all previous strategy documents.
It was bound fail to once 30 or 50 points of entry had been identified even though the UK had two weeks extra to prepare than Europe by virtue of being an island.
All those Contagion movies bozo and Wancock based their policies on assume a single Patient Zero.
But they were seen to be DOING SOMETHING and that was always the whole point (of lockdowns, masks, etc. etc. as well
Indeed. The whole lot is a classic political syllogism, based on the idea “something must be done….” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
What can you buy with 37 billion pounds?
Building a robotic scientist and putting it on Mars – £1.8bn
The most expensive highway project in US History – £20.5bn
The Hubble Telescope – £7.9bn
The Channel Tunnel – £12bn
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/four-huge-projects-cost-less-19988125
6uilding 6ritain 6ackwards
A loaf of bread next summer
With the necessary wheelbarrow worth considerably more.
Really high quality gallows.
Nationwide packs of robot dogs sniffing peoples body temperature from yards away (as recently seen on YouTube in China) then linked to facial recognition software to bark at people before they get bundled away by persons in space suits.