The underfire NHS Test and Trace system is spending nearly £1m a day on external management consultants to provide the service, MPs were told yesterday.
The budget for external consultants was revealed as officials insisted that the taxpayer was receiving value for money from the testing and tracing programme.
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Labour branded the news as “scandalous” and accused the Government of squandering money on its testing and contact tracing service.
No profiteering
Whitehall mandarins said they did not believe profiteering had gone on, despite the large daily rates forked out to the private sector, telling MPs that consultants had lowered their usual fees in order to assist with the pandemic.
Baroness Dido Harding, head of NHS Test and Trace, told the Commons Public Accounts Committee she felt it was “appropriate” to bring in external help in “extreme emergency circumstances” such as that faced by the country during the coronavirus crisis.
MPs were told that NHS Test and Trace was relying on around 900 external consultants – down from 1,000 – from firms, such as Deloittes, who were being paid an average of £1,000 a day.
David Williams, Second Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, said the Government would not have been able to deliver the “testing or contact tracing service without the use of a range of consultants”.
And he added: “I don’t think we are being taken advantage of.”
He said he did not want to “get into the specific detail of individual contracts” when asked about reports that some consultants were earning as much as £7,000 per day.
The daily cost of around £900,000 a day for consultants comes as the test and trace service has come under sustained criticism over its failure to get in touch with sufficient numbers of people who have come into contact with those infected with Covid-19.
A report by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) in September said the testing programme was having only a “marginal” impact on transmission.
This is despite the service being handed a £22bn budget, which is larger than annual budget for the Home Office.
Material impact
Baroness Harding defended NHS Test and Trace, saying she believed it was having a “material impact” on tackling coronavirus, and was carrying out nearly 1,000 PCR swab tests every minute.
But Labour’s Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Rachel Reeves said: “It is scandalous that this incompetent Conservative Government has chosen to waste enormous sums of public money on 900 management consultants paid £1,000 a day rather than put public health teams in charge of contact tracing like other countries have.
“Ministers have approached this pandemic as a get rich quick scheme for outsourcing companies when they should have invested in local public services instead.”
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