The Test and Trace scheme is set to receive an extra £15,000,000,000, bringing its total funding over two years to £37,000,000,000.

The figure emerged on the same day that the government revealed NHS staff will receive a mere one per cent pay rise in the coming year, in a move described by the nurses’ union as “pitiful”.

Test and Trace has seen a catalogue of errors since its inception. The contact tracing scheme has also come under fire for tweaking its counting method to boost the number of “contacts reached” by Test and Trace.

The Prime Minister has said that leaving lockdown will rely on a huge boost in Covid tests, with Test and Trace gearing up to roll out a mass testing blitz once restrictions are lifted.

NHS Test and Trace is preparing to send out more than 400,000 rapid lateral flow tests by post each day in a bid to get the country back to normal.

https://www.cityam.com/test-and-trac...nding-to-37bn/



Throwing good money after bad .....

TnT has been one miserable failure after another but filled the pockets of the private sector participants .....

Although not mentioned regularly in the Budget Red Book, the small print confirms that Test and Trace will receive “a further £15 billion next year” – on top of the £22 billion it received this financial year up to 31 March.

Commons public accounts committee chair Meg Hillier added: “Matt Hancock massively oversold this, saying it was part of the NHS when it’s not. It’s costing a lot of money and it’s unclear whether it is having more than a marginal impact on the pandemic. And I think if you compare it with the vaccines, the order of magnitude of spending is massively different. If this is a permanent agency set-up we need to know what it’s going to look like when it starts delivering what is likely to be routine testing and tracing. Or is this £37bn is being spent on something that’s a temporary fix? Either way, the taxpayer deserves to know more about how effective it is, pound for pound. For the eye watering sums of money spent, even in the context of Covid, we need to know that this money isn’t just nugatory** spending, that there is a legacy left as a result of this.”

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/po...ection-223515/



* Nearly 25% of the “Covid reserve”

** Nugatory indeed .....

https://www.cityam.com/test-and-trac...nding-to-37bn/



Throwing good money after bad .....

TnT has been one miserable failure after another but filled the pockets of the private sector participants .....

And there was me thinking T'n'T had finally got things sorted and it was working really well.

The Public Accounts Committee said NHS Test and Trace was set up on the basis it would help prevent future lockdowns - but since it creation there had been two more.

The MPs' report questioned:

• An over-reliance on consultants with some paid more than £6,600 a day
• A failure to be ready for the surge in demand for tests seen last September
• Never meeting its target to turn around tests done face-to-face within 24 hours
• Contact tracers only having enough work to fill half their time even when cases were rising
• A splurge on rapid tests with no clear evidence they will help

The cross-part group of MPs was looking at spending on all elements of testing and tracing.

Not all of the money has been allocated yet. But the bulk of it is going on the lab-based PCR testing system, which includes the hundreds of local testing centres and network of mega-labs across the UK to process the tests.

Some £10bn has been set aside for rapid testing, which is currently being used in schools as well as being sent to employers.

The committee acknowledges significant investment was needed to set up the system at speed after the pandemic struck. But the committee criticised an over-use of consultants, saying it needed to "wean itself off its persistent reliance on consultants" which were costing an average of £1,100 a day each and some of whom had been paid more than £6,600 per day. On last count, there were still 2,500 being used, the MPs said.

The complexity of the system was also laid bare with news that it had involved more than 400 contracts being signed with 217 different suppliers. Some 70% of the value of those contacts were directly awarded rather than being put out to tender. But the MPs said the investment had helped to massively increase testing capacity. When the pandemic started the UK could only process about 3,000 tests a day, but that had increased to more than 800,000 by January.

By contrast, contact tracers have been under-used with just half of time spent working on cases in October.

Dr Billy Palmer, of the Nuffield Trust think tank, said:

In a rare interview, Dido Harding said England's Test and Trace service was "an essential component in the fight against COVID" and promised it would be carrying on for some time to come.

Asked about its cost, she said it was "an awful lot less than £37bn", but added that large sums were necessary to deliver testing - which she claimed accounted for around 80% of the budget - at mass scale.

Baroness Harding disputed the PAC's claims, saying Test and Trace published extensive data and "was meeting the targets set by SAGE".

She dismissed the report from the Public Accounts Committee as "old news," saying it only went up to the end of October: "basically half our life."

Test and Trace 'no clear impact' despite £37bn budget - Public Accounts Committee report

House of Commons Public Accounts Committee
COVID-19: Test, track and trace (part 1)
Forty-Seventh Report of Session 2019–21

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56340831



TnT has been an almost complete waste of an enormous amount of money, having achieved nothing of significance, failing to halt the spread of the virus and merely maintaining a manipulated record of tests .....

With "Disastrous" Dido in charge, TnT was always going to be an expensive failure .....