Covid-19: Test and Trace boss Dido Harding defends £22billion system after scathing report

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The former head of the Government’s Treasury today branded NHS Test & Trace the ‘most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time’.

Sir Nicholas Macpherson, a member of the House of Lords and former permanent secretary to Downing Street’s finance department, has waded into the row over the system after a scathing report last night said it was having ‘no measurable effect’.

Sir Nicholas posted a cutting tweet that added: ‘The extraordinary thing is that nobody in the government seems surprised or shocked. No matter: the BoE will just print more money.’

Test and Trace boss Dido Harding, Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock all jumped to the service’s defence today, calling Test and Trace ‘essential’ in the wake of the report. 

The trio joined Transport Secretary Grant Shapps in justifying the £22billion Test and Trace programme.

The comments came after the Commons Public Accounts Committee said there was no evidence the tracing scheme had made a dent in Covid transmission, despite its ‘unimaginable’ budget. 

Last year No10 spent £22bn on Test and Trace and the Chancellor promised to throw another £15bn at it in 2021, bringing the total cost to £37bn. The PAC report said the Government was treating British taxpayers ‘like an ATM machine’.

But Baroness Harding today claimed the report was ‘old news’ and only went up to October. She said the scheme cost ‘an awful lot less than £37billion’ and is ‘meeting targets set by SAGE’.

And during Prime Minister’s Questions, the Prime Minister backed the programme, telling MPs: ‘It’s thanks to NHS Test and Trace that we’re able to send kids back to school and begin cautiously and irreversibly to reopen our economy and restart our lives.’

MPs on the PAC said there was little proof people who were contacted through the programme were actually complying with the isolation rules. 

Speaking on ITV today, Baroness Harding said large funding was needed to deliver the testing, which accounts for ’80 per cent of all the costs’.

She said: ‘Over the course of the last nine months, over 83million tests have been conducted. 

‘We’ve reached 9.1million people and asked them to isolate, and every single one of those people who have been asked to isolate has helped to stop the spread of Covid. 

‘The remaining 20 per cent – over £1billion – has gone to local authorities to support the work that local authorities do, to support people when they’re isolating and to manage local outbreaks.’

Health Secretary Matt Hancock also said he believed the team behind Test and Trace had done ‘an amazing job’.

Mr Hancock told the BBC: ‘The team have built this testing capacity from nothing a year ago and so they’ve done an amazing job and I’m incredibly grateful to them.’ 

And Transport Secretary Grant Shapps described the report as ‘really quite strange’, insisting Test and Trace was ‘absolutely necessary’ and had ‘prevented the disease spreading further’. 

He pointed out the programme had tracked down 9million potentially-infected Brits who may have otherwise spread the virus.

Justifying the programme’s huge expenditure during a round of interviews this morning, Mr Shapps told Sky News: ‘It certainly hasn’t been cheap fighting coronavirus but it has absolutely been necessary.

‘This is a really quite strange report – 9.1million people have been contacted by Test and Trace. These are people who otherwise would be wandering around, often unaware that they had coronavirus, and spreading it around further.

‘Whatever the coronavirus experience we’ve had as a nation, good or bad, it would have been one heck of a lot worse if we didn’t have a Test and Trace system which has contacted so many people and prevented the disease spreading further.’

The report noted that, when the scheme launched in May last year, ministers had justified the vast expenditure – which was likened to the annual budget for the Department of Transport – on preventing a second national lockdown.

But the group of cross-party MPs highlighted the country was only just starting to emerge from the third extended period of draconian measures, questioning the programme’s effectiveness and value for money.

The report also urged the scheme to ‘wean itself off’ reliance on thousands of consultants and temporary staff, with the highest being paid a rate of £6,624 per day.

Labour MP Meg Hillier, chairwoman of the committee, urged the Government to demonstrate the ‘staggering investment of taxpayers’ money’ had been spent wisely.

She said: ‘Despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project Test and Trace cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic, and the promise on which this huge expense was justified – avoiding another lockdown – has been broken, twice.

‘DHSC and NHST&T must rapidly turn around these fortunes and begin to demonstrate the worth and value of this staggering investment of taxpayers’ money.

‘British taxpayers cannot be treated by Government like an ATM machine. We need to see a clear plan and costs better controlled.’

Between May 2020 and January 2021, daily UK testing capacity for Covid increased from about 100,000 to more than 800,000 tests, which the committee acknowledged was ‘striking’.

The service also contacted over 2.5million people testing positive for Covid in England and advised more than 4.5 million of their associated contacts to self-isolate.

But the percentage of total laboratory testing capacity used in November and December 2020 remained under 65 per cent. Even with the spare capacity, the service never met the target to turn around all tests in face-to-face settings in 24 hours, they found.

MPs noted the NHS programme publishes a significant amount of weekly data, including some that shows full compliance with the self-isolation rules relied upon by the scheme can be low.

But it criticised the failure to show the speed of the process from ‘cough to contact’ which stopped the public from being able to judge the overall effectiveness of the programme.

The report said: ‘There is still no clear evidence to judge NHST&T’s overall effectiveness. It is unclear whether its specific contribution to reducing infection levels, as opposed to the other measures introduced to tackle the pandemic has justified its costs.’

The MPs also criticised the scheme, led by Tory peer Dido Harding, for struggling to consistently match supply and demand for the service, which would often lead to ‘either sub-standard performance or surplus capacity’.

And they said it remained overly reliant on contractors and temporary staff after having to initially act quickly to scale up the service rapidly.

The report said the scheme admitted in February that it still employs around 2,500 consultants, at an estimated daily rate of around £1,100, with the most lucrative on £6,624.

‘It is concerning that the DHSC (Department of Health and Social Care) is still paying such amounts – which it considers to be “very competitive rates” to so many consultants,’ the report said.

Commenting on the report, Dr Peter Drobac, a public health expert at Oxford University, said: ‘This is a damning indictment of the UK’s Covid-19 response. Past outbreaks have taught us that a well-functioning test and trace system would slow the spread of the virus, save lives, and avert costly lockdowns.

‘Compare the failure of test and trace with the extraordinary success of the UK’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign. The vaccination rollout has been entrusted to the NHS, relying on extraordinary health professionals and existing infrastructure in communities across the country.

‘In contrast, Test and Trace is an opaque centralised service built from scratch by consultants with little or no public health expertise. Imagine what the NHS and Public Health England could have done with £22billion.

‘It’s worth remembering that we need an effective test and trace system as desperately today as we did a year ago, and we’ll need it years from now to be ready for the next pandemic threat. A reformed test and trace system integrated with NHS and PHE should be a top priority.’