[ 2021-03-10 ]

England’s £23bn test and trace programme condemned by MPs

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England’s test and trace programme failed to
make a “measurable difference” to the spread
of the pandemic despite an outlay of £23bn, an
“unimaginable” level of expenditure, a
parliamentary spending watchdog has claimed.

Meg Hillier, chairman of the House of Commons
public accounts committee, said the test and trace
programme had cost the equivalent to the annual
budget of the Department for Transport.

British taxpayers “cannot be treated by
government like an ATM machine”, she said. “We
need to see a clear plan and costs better
controlled.”

In May last year, Boris Johnson, UK prime
minister, told MPs that a “world-beating”
test and trace scheme would be in place by June 1
2020. However, the programme was beset with
problems, such as long test turnround times and
delays in reaching contacts of infected people.

The initial lockdown last spring was followed by
further orders to stay at home in the autumn and
winter. Hillier said the test and trace programme
was supposed to have avoided the need for further
lockdowns but added that this “promise” had
been “broken, twice”.



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Although £23bn has been spent, the test and
trace programme has been allocated a total of
£37bn over two years. The committee said the
scheme must now “wean itself off its persistent
reliance on consultants” paid up to £6,600 a
day and demonstrate “the worth and value of this
staggering investment of taxpayers’ money”.

In early February NHS Test&Trace said it was
still employing around 2,500 consultants, at an
estimated average daily rate of
around £1,100, with £6,624 the highest daily
rate paid. “It is concerning that the [health
department] is still paying such amounts — which
it considers to be ‘very competitive rates’
— to so many consultants,” the committee
added. 

The MPs pointed to the scale of the programme, run
by Lady Dido Harding, former chief executive of
the telecoms company TalkTalk. From its inception
in May until January this year, daily UK testing
capacity for Covid had increased from around
100,000 to over 800,000 tests. NHS Test&Trace had
also contacted more than 2.5m people testing
positive for Covid-19 in England and advised more
than 4.5m contacts to self-isolate. 



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Yet fewer than 65 per cent of this total
laboratory testing capacity had been used in
November and December. Even with this spare
capacity, test and trace had never met the
prime minister’s commitment to turn around all
tests in face-to-face settings in 24 hours — a
goal he had said would be met by the end of June.

The programme needed to strike a better balance
between “meeting surges in demand?.?.?.?and not
paying unnecessarily for surplus capacity”, the
MPs added. 

The PAC also questioned the decision to
allocate a further £7bn to the
programme in December, on top of £3bn
already budgeted, to roll out rapid tests for use
in schools and workplaces, despite questions over
their accuracy.

Ian Hudspeth, who chairs the Local Government
Association’s community wellbeing board, said
councils across the country had set up more than
300 local contact-tracing partnerships,
complementing the national system by successfully
tracing many hard-to-reach cases.

Involving councils at an earlier stage “could
have led to a more swift and effective test and
trace system”, he added.

Source - FT, UK

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