UK's NHS hands Accenture another £5m for Test and Trace system for another year

Flying in the face of a commitment to wean itself off consultants, the NHS Test and Trace programme has awarded Accenture a £4.8m contract extension to keep its much-criticised COVID-19 Test and Trace system up and running for another year. The latest contract will see the outsourcing consultancy and professional services …

[Anonymous Coward]

Inertia

As we see over and over again, it's much easier to start a program than to end it.

The usual suspects rely on this. They under bid and over promise to get their foot in the door because once they're in they're on the gravy train.

[Andy The Hat]

Nice money

£1100 per day ... so much for the poor sods at the sharp end on £1200 a month! :-(

[Pascal Monett]

"a commitment to wean itself off consultants"

Yeah but, was there a date on that ?

They'll wean themselves off - once the contract is over.

At which point they'll write a new contract and, lo and behold !, there will be other consultants.

At £1200/day.

Progress !

[Dr. G. Freeman]

So we're Tracking, isolating, Tracing for Suspected Unprecedented Pathogen (TITSUP for short) for another year.

Thought all this malarkey would be over by now.

[Anonymous Coward]

This gravy train has plenty of jus still.

[89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921]

No Chinese lab escape conspiracy theories required

One of the four coronaviruses which now merely cause the common cold, may have originally crossed over from cows circa 1890:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

...and there's speculation that it caused the Russian Flu pandemic which killed about a million people worldwide (out of 1.5 billion) over about 8 years ("abouts" abound, because records are scarce). By all accounts it caused a similar disease to Covid-19, killing the same people. Therefore with the increased level of present day international travel and herd immunity impossible with present vaccines (the best we can get is an average of 50% immunity with 100% of the world vaccinated, when we need 80% complete immunity to get herd immunity), we can expect about 20 years of Covid-19 flareups worldwide.

[Andre Carneiro]

£1200 per day AVERAGE?

Damn, I'd love to know the spread of these salaries, someone must be VERY happy about this pandemic right now.... :/

[smethy]

you do realise that individuals don't get that - the consultancies take a healthy margin? The salaries behind that are nothing close to the sticker price.

[LimpedIn]

My sister works for the NHS & her dept was assigned a management consultant from one of these big companies.

She asked him to build a financial model that the dept could use. Week after week, she chased him and received nothing. She complained about him to management and she was accused of being a troublemaker!

Eventually, the company was dismissed, but not before collecting £2m and producing nothing!

Head should roll, as there are people signing these contracts and payments off!!

[staringatclouds]

SERCO Test & Trace with an NHS badge slapped on to shift the blame for it's failure

Rest assured if it was working SERCO would be shouting from the rooftops that it was their product

[Anonymous Coward]

the real winners were the strategy companies (Bain, BCG) charging £7,500 per day and the likes of Deloitte who were bringing in analayst fresh of the boat but charging £3k a day for them