By Tony Winterburn • Published: 11 Dec 2020 • 8:51
WHAT Cost £22Bn and Still Doesn’t Work? – The UK’s Test and Trace System!
It’s a national disgrace, the cost of the failing Test and Trace hits £22bn and Boris Johnson still defends it! Test and Trace has been slated for failing to reach four in 10 contacts of people testing positive for coronavirus – and the ailing system has already set the UK back a staggering £22billion!
The ‘Test and Trace’ system has been heavily criticised after a series of high-profile failures since its launch earlier this year, and ministers concede it has not performed as well as they had hoped.
What makes matters worse is that a recent watchdog report found that NHS Test and Trace call handlers spent just 1% of their time actually working. With the budget for the operation soaring, financial watchdogs said the situation needed to improve.
Unbelievable Inefficiency!
The National Audit Office (NAO) found that while the Government had “rapidly scaled up” the scheme, at times “parts of the national tracing service have barely been used”. This indicated that they had little work to do, the watchdog said. To help administer the system, the Department for Health signed contracts for 3,000 health professionals and 18,000 call handlers- the call handler contracts alone were worth up to £720 million!
The study comes in the wake of Prime Minister Boris Johnson promising a world-class system dubbed Operation Moonshot, first carried out in Liverpool, could cost a reported £100 billion.
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