NHS Test and Trace boss Dido Harding said the £12,000,000,000 programme is 'undoubtedly a very important' part of the Government's efforts to tackle the spread of infection. But she said 'it has never been and it never will be' the sole solution to tackling the outbreak.

NHS Test and Trace has faced sustained criticism in recent months after statistics showed it was repeatedly struggling to get in touch with the contacts of people who have tested positive. It emerged last week that the system had failed to reach nearly 250,000 close contacts of people who have tested positive.

I’ve been talking to someone working on test and trace in a call centre subcontracted to Serco. Here’s what this person told me.

Until last week, the workers at the call centre were doing the simplest job in the tracing chain, calling those who have been identified as contacts of infected people and telling them to isolate themselves for 14 days, giving them some scripted advice and collecting a small amount of data. But last week, the call centre announced that all the workers on this contract were being “upskilled”. Instead of making these simple calls, they would now be calling infected patients and discovering all their contacts over the past fortnight. To use the official terms, they have suddenly been promoted from level 3 call handlers to level 2 clinical contact caseworkers.

But the workers at the call centre who have been “upskilled” to this level are mostly school-leavers and students, with no relevant qualifications. While the job is officially advertised at between £16.97 and £27.15 per hour, they are all being paid the minimum wage, which means £6.45 for the 18- to 20-year-olds (most of them) and £8.72 for over-25s.

Serco issued an internal notice explaining this change, which was leaked to the press. From 21 October, it said, “a number of experienced agents from Serco and Sitel will assist with index case tracing”.

What it didn’t say is that some of these “experienced agents” are 18 years old. The “appropriate training” for the magical transformation to “experienced clinician” lasted four hours. It was conducted remotely, as they now work from home, and consisted of a PowerPoint presentation, an online conversation, a quiz, some e-learning modules and some new call scripts.

So how has it gone? During the first hour of the first day, three of the young tracers called people who had just lost someone they loved to Covid-19. The people they spoke to were in extreme distress. After these calls, all three tracers “were distraught and crying”, and unable to work for the rest of the day.

The government’s Test and Trace system has had its least successful week since launching, after it failed to trace more than 40 per cent of the close contacts of people who tested positive for coronavirus.

The system, run by Baroness Dido Harding, traced 59.9 per cent of contacts, meaning up to 113,000 potentially infected people were missed.

The system only performed marginally better in the previous week, tracing 60.6 per cent of close contacts overall

Figures show that the average level of contact tracing is being brought down by those working in call centres or remotely.

This poor performance occurred in the same week that a record number of new Covid cases were discovered, with 137,180 people testing positive for the virus.

While it is often referred to as the NHS Test and Trace system, some people have criticised this label, arguing that the government is using the NHS brand to avoid criticism.

Of the 35 organisations listed as “data processors” for the Test and Trace system, only four are NHS bodies, another four are Public Health England bodies and one is the Ministry of Defence.

The other 26 are private companies, including Amazon, DHL, G4S, Palantir and Serco.

It's not about Harding but about procurement rules being applied to healthcare. That is a bigger subject than Covid 19.

It may well be but let's start with the immediate killer and disabler .....

Tory MP John Penrose said he was alerted by the app, part of the operation overseen by his wife, Dido Harding, who has not been told to self-isolate, Mr Penrose said.

Mr Penrose said on Twitter that he had no symptoms as yet.

Asked if he had spoken to his wife about it, he told the Press Association: "We are trying to make sure we are doing it by the book, if I can put it that way. Her NHS app has not gone off, so it's someone I have been in contact with rather than her.*"

In response to a suggestion that it showed the system worked, Mr Penrose said: "I suppose it does."