MPs slam UK's £22bn Test and Trace programme for failing to provide evidence that it slows COVID pandemic The UK's eye-wateringly expensive Test and Trace system has failed to provide any data showing it is effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19, according to a damning report from MPs. The influential Public Accounts Committee (PAC), a spending watchdog made up of MPs from across the political spectrum, pointed out that …
That's incorrect.
The vast, vast majority of the money didn't go to SERCO, it went on testing.
Serco were involved in the "trace" part, because you obviously don't want doctors and nurses going to people's houses and knocking on doors.
See the fullfact link I've posted elsewhere in this article for more information.
The whole "T&T is a multibillion pound outsourcing disaster" is misinformation at best.
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If it goes badly blame it on someone else; if it goes well take the credit.
So it's "NHS Test & Trace" and "Government Vaccination Programme" (complete with Minister who does nothing as far as I can see).. Of course it should be Dido Harding Test & Trace" and "NHS Vaccination Programme".
A-Harding-reigns-gonna-fall:-
https://twnews.co.uk/gb-news/from-news-a-harding-reigns-gonna-fall
1995: After a stint as a trainee management consultant at McKinsey, 27-year-old Dido gets her first proper job: marketing director, no less, at Thomas Cook. “Thomas Cook spends a long time contemplating its navel,” an exec from a rival firm tells Marketing Week. “It is in character for it to recruit a consultant rather than a doer.” Harding takes the criticism in her stride: “It is common for consultants to be thought of as eggheads who don’t know what they’re doing. I want to prove I can do things before the label sticks.”
1997: Interviewed by Travel Trade Gazette, Harding makes a virtue of her ignorance. “I am not ashamed to say I do not know the travel industry as well as my colleagues. But in a team I think I bring a new perspective.”
1998: When she was hired, Thomas Cook said Harding would “look at the future for the business in five to 10 years’ time”. But after four years she is off, moving to employment services group Manpower as “senior vice-president, strategic marketing Europe”.
1999: Time for another change of horses: Harding becomes commercial director of struggling retail group Woolworths.
2000: After less than a year she gallops off to join Tesco as “commercial director for value added foods”.
2004: She is now Tesco’s “international support director”, responsible for its overseas ventures. In 2003, Dido told the Guardian that she hopes “still to be with Tesco in five years’ time”. So, inevitably…
2007: Dido deserts Tesco for arch-rivals Sainsbury: after an obligatory few months of gardening leave, in March 2008 she starts work as head of Sainsbury convenience stores. But not for long.
2009: In December, Harding announces she will join TalkTalk as chief executive in March 2010.
2011: TalkTalk incurs a £3m fine from Ofcom for sending thousands of customers inaccurate bills. The firm has to shell out a further £2.5m in refunds. During her time at TalkTalk she twice wins the Daily Mail’s wooden spoon award for providing “the worst customer service in the UK”.
2014: Dido’s old university chum David Cameron gives her a seat in parliament as a Tory peer.
2015: Cyber-criminals access the financial and personal details of more than 150,000 TalkTalk customers. Asked if the data was encrypted or not, chief executive Baroness Harding sighs: “The awful truth is that I don’t know.” Almost 100,000 customers leave TalkTalk and profits are halved.
2017: Harding leaves TalkTalk to try her hand at “public service activities”. She becomes chair of NHS Improvement, responsible for overseeing all NHS hospitals, but tells MPs on the health select committee: “I have not worked in health and social care and would be the first to admit I have a lot to learn about the sector.” She also airily rejected the MPs’ call to resign the Tory whip while holding what should be an independent post. Then along comes Covid…
2020: Following her brief, calamitous spell as track-and-trace supremo, Lady H is to chair the new NIHP. Matt Hancock dismisses MPs’ mutterings about her lack of health credentials, assuring ITV News she has “excellent experience”. Indeed, by her previous standards three years at the NHS probably do count as a wealth of experience. With Dido on board, the NIHP can now look to the future as confidently as, say, Thomas Cook or Woolworths...
NO HORSE SENSE…
An incident at the Cheltenham Festival back in March suggests Dido Harding, boss of the new health protection body, has much to learn about public health.
Well, she did start early: "commercial director for value added foods" at Tesco 2000 to 2004 where she had to be hurriedly promoted sideways to “international support director” (a non-existent position up until then). Even at that position she was apparently asked if she wouldn't mind finding an alternative position ... preferable away from Tesco.
> Since one of the UK's biggest ever corporate cyber-crimes happened on her watch as TalkTalk CEO, the Queen of Carnage Baroness Dido Harding was an obvious choice to head up the NHS Test and Trace system so vital to the nation's pandemic response when it was created in May 2020.
It's almost as if this isn't remotely relevant and is just more tedious Tory bashing from this once great website.
It's almost as if this isn't remotely relevant and is just more tedious Tory bashing from this once great website.
I think you'll find the media tend to bash the party in power because they're the one's f**king up. At the moment Labour are getting a free(ish) ride as they're not in power so can't do anything expect emit hot air.
This particular bunch of Tories appear to need a bashing. They are spending spectacular amounts of money on dysfunctional programs at a time when the economy is under unique pressure. I suspect the country wouldn't fair much better if the other lot were in power but it would likely be down to genuine ineptitude rather than the Old boys/girls club.
Can you imagine the outcome if Corbyn was in power over the last year?
It could hardly be any worse than what we've already experienced: the worst death rate (pro rata) in the world, £22B+ spunked away on a test and trace system that doesn't work, repeatedly broken promises on testing and a "world beating" app that still doesn't exist, record national debt and the biggest budget deficits in history. hundreds of thousands of wrecked businesses and millions losing their jobs, pitiful quarantine measures for visitors that's a year too late, NHS on its arse and its workforce shafted (again), Nightingale hospitals with no patients, dodgy contracts to cronies for worthless PPE, etc.
If that tosser Corbyn was in charge he wouldn't have wasted public money if he tried. Whenever he'd tell Diane Abbott to bung his cronies a couple of billion, that finanical genius would send them £4.23 and a used scratch card.
NHS was already on its arse, pandemic only exposed it. Basically, there's no slack left into any large-scale system to accommodate for 'out of ordinary' situation, because the slack has been removed due to 'cost optimisation' (don't ask me where the alleged savings have gone to).
Well we will never know will we? He might have been a disaster - or it might have made him. Crises test people and it's not always the bragging blustery 'i'm so tough they asked me not to join the SAS because I'd shame the others' walts who actually step up. On the other hand we do know hat the current lot are incapable of thinking more than one Daily Mail edition ahead of their Fortnum and Mason's hamper.
So basically 'imagine' vs 'know'
FFS! There's no "tedious Tory bashing" going on here.
Dildo Harding is being (rightly) criticised for being a grossly incompetent fuckup who has a long history of fucking up everything she touches. That criticism is perfectly reasonable and more than justified. It's fair comment.
The fact she's probably a Tory is irrelevant. Though who knows for certain how Dildo votes or if she's a party menber?
Dildo is of course one of Boris's cronies. And married to a Tory MP. Which these days seem to be the essential requirements for receiving trainloads of cash from HM taxpayers.
It's beyond comprehension that Dildo was the best choice to run the Test and Trace programme. Apart from Flailing Failing Grayling, anyone could have done a far better job.
Bingham was chair of the vaccine task force. I recall reading somewhere that right in the early days, i.e. not long after the SARS2 genome had been published, some of the UK scientists starting vaccine development roped her in to organise production so in effect the government was presented with a fait accompli. This may have been a story invented after the event; however it has a ring of truth in it in that somebody competent got the job which is not a normal outcome of the BoJo circus's way of appointing people to this sort of position.
the tories are getting a taste of their own. They have always gleefully promoted the idea that anyone on a benefit is a lazy scrounger and deserving of derision even if it's tory policy that put them on the benefit in the first place.
Now everyone assumes the tories are a bunch of corrupt, incompetent and heartless wankers. Boohoo. The difference is that that has mostly proven to be true where these shady nepotistic deals have any light shed on them. There's still plenty in the dark as well.
DWP pays about £3.2bn to run its entire IT infrastructure to a combination of vendors, outsourcers and internals. That covers 900+ offices, 80,000+ staff, 18m claimants using 150+ different apps, and payments of £100bn+ in benefits a year.
DWP isn't a shining beacon of efficiency either, it's had some horrendous cockups and overspends on technology in the past (EDS and the CSA computer system, Universal Credit, PIP etc).
Even with all that in mind, T&T is a fraction of the size/staff and has spent DWP's entire IT budget nearly 7 times over.
It hardly bears saying... but what now? The PAC as far as I am aware have no real teeth or ability to change anything, so as usual it's back to the Tory BAU of the transference of wealth from the public to the private with no real world punitive measures to bring them back in line.
I'm appreciative that someone looks into this, but it all seems a bit futile if the only real outcome is a somewhat sarcastic tweet.
This is precisely the problem.
When you have people who suffer no consequences for squandering someone else's money, those people have absolutely no incentive to ensure that money is spent responsibly.
Governments around the world use the fact that you can't prosecute a politician for the consequences of their decisions while in office to re-distribute massive amounts of taxpayer money to their mates and cronies. This won't change until holding public office does not come with a get out of jail free card.
At least the NHS staff are real people spending into the real economy. I'd prefer that to all the exec's and shareholders getting massive gains from from companies doing share buybacks to artificially increase share values using virtually free taxpayer QE money, or R&D money, and pushing it through offshore tax havens.
I do understand that and did not liken it to QE. What I am saying is the money given to these people will be returned to the active real economy that benefits everyone so I don't begrudge that.
The same cannot be said about the biggest benefactors of QE and other forms of corrupt crony capitalism who prefer to withhold the money and keep it from circulating in a productive economy.
"wins the prize for the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time"
Not sure he has got it right. Quite possibly "so far", but "of all time" disregards how much better they will do next year now that it is clear what can be achieved if people really make an effort.
... is the proportion of test results delivered in under 24 hours from the swab being taken*. Dido Harding does not know, and, for some reason has not even bothered to find out. Test and Trace does not publish results from which this number can be determined. This is not merely incompetence, it is dereliction of duty.
My personal experience (and one should never generalise from a single example) is that none of my three tests returned a result in under 4 days. This is totally inadequate to reduce infection rates for a virus that exhibits such a high rate of infection. (I would be interested to hear from other Register readers of their experiences of Test and Trace.)
I would certainly be very interested to know the qualifications of the 'competitively priced' consultants on over £6k PER DAY, and why Baroness Harding thinks they are worth that level of fee.
*(It is as important to know that you are infected and have to isolate, as it is to know that you are not infected with Covid-19, and can get back to work, and your contacts do not have to isolate either and can keep the economy going.)
"I would be interested to hear from other Register readers of their experiences of Test and Trace."
I can only cite my daughter's experience. Returning from Spain she had the option of taking a test (back at the airport). After ringing several times for the delayed result she decided to drive back to the test centre and was half way there when they rung back.
I haven't read of the PAC getting into this aspect of T&T but maybe they should: schoolchildren failing a lateral flow test can have a PCR test to overrule it. A test taken at school has no such option. The essence of a a quick test known to return a proportion of false positives is that it's treated as a presumptive test whose positives you should follow up with a definitive test. It's almost as if T&T and/or DoE don't know what they're doing.
From today's Financial Times* (front page article - their website has a paywall):
"Yet less than 65 per cent of 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."
*(I only get it when there is an article I want to read, it is a bit too pricey for every day at £2.90, and the web site subscription is £35 per month!)
A quick search shows several. One reason I wouldn't install one is because I fear malware. Another reason is because I don't really resent online newspapers getting the cash flow to pay journalists a living wage - even thought that means I don't always get to read an article I want to read. Is the world worse off because I didn't read it? Certainly not. Am I worse off, or am I just feeling worse off? Probably the latter, almost all the time.
My personal experience (and one should never generalise from a single example) is that none of my three tests returned a result in under 4 days. This is totally inadequate to reduce infection rates for a virus that exhibits such a high rate of infection. (I would be interested to hear from other Register readers of their experiences of Test and Trace.)
Day 2 and Day 5 (TTR) within 24 hours, Day 8 just over 24 hours. Either they're getting better or number of test they do has reduced sufficiently that they can get results expediently.
In the news today, the response from Harding and her acolytes is that the system is world leading in that the UK is testing more than any other nation. The complaint, that doesn't seem to have struck home is that even a world leading amount of testing hasn't noticeably had any affect on managing the pandemic.
A smart government wouldn't set the number of tests as the target, they would have set one related to reducing the infection rate. It was Deming who said (paraphrased) "Set people a target on which their jobs depend and they will do all they can to meet it - even it it requires destroying the company in the process." It's not party related as ISTR it was a Labour government that set NHS targets that bore little relationship to health outcomes (like patients had to be cleared from A&E within 4 hours - it didn't matter whether the patient survived in order to meet the target).
It's the seductive lure of numbers. They are the rocks on which the unwary will dash themselves to pieces. Reducing something to numbers is irresistible. The easier the better and best of all if the numbers turn up on a display without you having to have the skill to operate some device to get them. Numbers become and end in themselves. They're much easier to deal with than the messy business which is the reality they represent. Management by numbers, therefore, becomes management by the numbers which are easiest to collect.
Using numbers to measure performance is good; the problem comes when those measures are then used as targets. A lot of managers (and consultants) talk of KPIs - totally ignoring the “K” - it means KEY, not “anything you can manage to measure.” Few Performance Indicators are really Key.
£2bn - Amount NASA budgeted to send Perseverance rover to Mars, landing it on planet to collect samples and search for signs of alien life.
£22bn - Amount UK government budgeted to set up 'world-beating' test and trace system for coronavirus, which Dido Harding said last week was 'continuing to improve'.
Ah, yes. Continuous improvement.
The powers that be decided on TQM - mantra "Get it right first time every time." (They, the top team, spectacularly failed at that one ballsing up a projected relocation.)
Then they decided we had to move up a gear to ISO9000 - mantra "Continuous improvement.".
Nobody explained why, if we were getting it right first time every time there was scope for any improvement, let alone continuous improvement.
The test registration site is a ballsup. I was asked by my local hospital to do a home test. It arrived in an envelope that was massive and wouldn't fit through the letterbox so was dumped on the doorstep. The contents would have easily fit into a much smaller envelope that would have fitted.
I went through the online registration of my test kit and after getting to the end and going through the Google captcha looking for crosswalks I got a message saying "there was a problem, try again." Tried again only this time I was looking for fire hydrants and got the same message. Pretty sure I did both capchas correctly. I phoned the number given to register my test kit instead as the website didn't work. Waded through the menu system then got cut off. Phoned again and finally managed to speak to someone to register the kit.
I may be wrong, but from what I understand of that mysterious sixth person who went missing with the Brazilian strain of the virus also failed to register their test kit online. Probably the same issue that failed with mine, so their kit wasn't properly registered to anyone, resulting in that massive manhunt.
So much incompetence, so little time...
I went through the online registration of my test kit and after getting to the end and going through the Google captcha looking for crosswalks I got a message saying "there was a problem, try again." Tried again only this time I was looking for fire hydrants and got the same message.
Now that you have brought the matter up can anyone tell me why anyone navigating a Captcha has to interpret photographs of (for example) USian street furniture despite not living there or (as in my case) not even having visited the place? And why are the blasted pictures (a) so small (e.g. the size of a postage stamp) and (b) an exercise in minimising the number of pixels involved?
Where is the grumply old git icon when you most need one?
</grumpyoldgit>
Fully agree. The other issue is why do they "need" to have a captcha at the end of the registration process anyway? The likely result is that some people fail to register their test kits and test and trace are left with kits they are unable to connect to anyone, rendering them worse than useless.
because it's COOL!!!
because it makes sites SECURE (everybody says that!)
because "everybody" uses CAPCHA"
because what if a secret army of Russian / Chinese bots wanted to register, we'd be DOOMED!
because I'm paid 6K per day to tell you to implement it and shut the fuck up or else!
So, the Track, Isolate, Test for Suspected Unprecedented Pathogen (TITSUP) system went Tits up, what's the problem? Did exactly what the Government described in the document.
And £22 Billion went into the pension pots of a few of the People in charge's mates, again, what they wanted.
It wasn't about saving lives, or even protecting them, if it were, they would have done things that actually worked. (theoretically)
...ah yes, Meg Hiller - former minister for identity cards in the Labour government.So I guess she knows pretty much everything about wasting a fortune on a government project.
The money wasn't really wasted, the project was just filed away until it could be repackaged. Which was one of the issues around the centralised Track & Trace idea, which although probably more useful for epidemiologists, had obvious risk of scope creep. But it's conditioning people to accept the 'need' for tracking and contact/proximity tracing by more than just the usual FANG gang.
Next step will be the vaccine 'passport'. Which has shades of the 'creeping compulsion' used in the ID Cards project, ie the idea that you'd 'need' an ID Card to do things you'd previously been able to do without one. Same thing is happening with 'passport' proposals, so you'll 'need' one to travel, work, go for a drink, or concert..
But also potentially pointless given the number of Covid strains floating around now, which implies it mutates easily and some vaccines have limited effectiveness against new strains. 66m people, say 80% effectiveness, 13.2m people still at risk of circulating the virus, or incubating a new version.
As I get older I am more and more amazed at figures like 22 billion. I mean 22 _million_ is mind-boggling enough. I'm too lazy to go and read reports on what they actually spent the money on, but are we not in the realms of "could have had a few aircraft carriers for that" - something perhaps that would do a better service to the country.
How do you prove that
(a) anything else could actually have done better in practice rather than theory (especially bearing in mind my next point...)
(b) it would not have worked better if there were no idiots doing things like registering with someone else's name and address so "I won't need to take time off but they'll get told to self-isolate and it will fuck them right up" or "I got told to isolate but no fucking app is gonna tell me what to do and the Tories can go fuck themselves"... and rather a lot of similar comments.
It's not all down to a failure by the app, is it?
IDK, maybe you could look around at other countries and compare what they did. That might answer point a) .
As to point b) you are right, if you fetishize the gig economy, condone millions living a weeks wages from destitution and then ask them to give up two weeks work (and potentially lead to their families and friends also having to isolate) without putting in place an effective support system ,then that's what you get.
I don't think anyone is blaming test and trace failure on a syntax error in an Android app - it's a systemic failure of a failed system.
Dear Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells...
Clearly you are desperate to absolve Dido Harding of blame, and yes I have read https://fullfact.org/health/test-trace-march-2021/ - thank you for the link.
It points out that only a small proportion of the money has gone to Serco. That's about all really.
It doesn't confirm that the whole thing has been well managed, or even cost-effectively managed. It is a matter of record that many of the contacts were not tendered, and the system is unwieldy. There is no denying that the tracing app was an utter fiasco and the current tracing program has yet to show any actual material benefit, due to the slow and low percentage tracing success rate.
Dido Harding is responsible for the whole sh1tshow.
She is also the wife of the Tory MP who leads the anticorruption ctte for the Tories.
This is endemic of all the appalling cronyism seen not just here but in PPE contracts etc.
People are right, and have a right, to be p1ssed off.
Delusional of Tunbridge Wells would be a much more appropriate name for Dildo Harding's biggest fan.
After £37 billlon and almost a year of effort the best that useless fuckup can say is her track and trace system is showing signs of improvement. Well, I think we're entitled so see a lot more than "signs of improvement".
The scum responsible for this clusterfuck of corruption, incompetence, sleaze and carnage should be in jail. 125,000 convictions for manslaughter would do for starters.
Looking at worldometer - I lack better stats - I see that the UK is about 6th in the world on the coveted deaths per million stat, 15th on tests per million, yet 25th on cases per million.
This appears to suggest abysmal targeting of the testing regime. Clearly the same people have been tested over and over again.
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