It appears that more information is coming out about Test and Trace. That information is really not good. According to a report issued by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, millions upon millions of pounds have been wasted on a Test and Trace system designed to reduce the spread of Covid, that has not delivered the required results.

The report said that there was an over reliance on expensive outside consultants to set up and run the scheme, some of whom were on £1000 per day, with the Test and Trace scheme not delivering what it should have done. This is an appalling waste of money.

As I see it the Government built a test and trace system from scratch, in the middle of a pandemic, when in my view the backbone for the testing and tracing of disease should have been in place before Covid kicked off. After all we have had warnings that novel or unexpected diseases could appear. There’s been the Ebola outbreaks in Africa, the Swine Flu epidemic and most importantly the SARS COV 1 outbreak at the turn of the century. A pandemic was somewhat expected and from the various scientific chatter that I’ve seen, the most likely pandemic would be a respiratory disease. After all Ebola is nasty and very often lethal but is less transmissible than something like flu or Covid.

I can’t help wondering why the UK did not have a system, that could have been mothballed until needed, that might have been able to step in at an early stage and engage in disease and contact tracing? It’s not as if epidemiology is a new science, it’s been with us since John Snow traced cholera outbreaks in London in the 19^th century. There should not have been any need for a government to have to panic and throw money at new systems that were run by consultants who by the nature of the emergency, had the government over a barrel.

Sky News in reporting on the findings of the Public Accounts Committee said:

Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the committee, said: “The national Test and Trace programme was allocated eye-watering sums of taxpayers’ money in the midst of a global health and economic crisis.

“It set out bold ambitions but has failed to achieve them despite the vast sums thrown at it.

“Only 14% of 691 million lateral flow tests sent out had results reported, and who knows how many took the necessary action based on the results they got, or how many were never used.

“The continued reliance on the over-priced consultants who ‘delivered’ this state of affairs will by itself cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds.

Now I’m one of those who believe that Governments should mostly stay out of peoples lives, that governments should not spend money on fripperies and wasteful virtue signalling. But I do believe that governments should spend money on defending the nation from threats whether those threats be military or biological ones. The problem appears to me to be that the government didn’t, even after Exercise Cygnus showed that Britain was woefully unprepared for a novel disease, shore up our defences against disease or create a proper epidemiology service. Maybe if the systems to monitor diseases that posed a threat were in place prior to the emergence of Covid, then we could have got a handle on it earlier and been able to slow the spread earlier?

It’s certainly looking as if Test and Trace has been an utter failure for everyone except the consultants who have trousered many millions of pounds of taxpayers money.

The Government has I have to admit done brilliantly with the vaccine roll out. But they were damned lucky that the vaccine arrived when it did and that the technology behind it had, after thirty or more years of study, come to fruition when it did. Where they have not done so well and have therefore landed the taxpayer with bills that will take years to pay off, is to prepare properly and therefore with less burden on the taxpayer, for an emergency that was, whether it came in the form of influenza or some other respiratory disease such as SARS COV2, that could reasonably be expected to arise.