A House of Commons committee has stated that the controversial test and trace scheme has failed to prove its effectiveness. The committee has also slammed the “unimaginable” costs to the taxpayer. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has released a report that states the Department of Health and Social Care poured vast sums of money into the scheme over the last year in an attempt to prevent a second national lockdown.
MPs have said the public “cannot be treated by Government like an ATM machine” to fund the programme which has been allocated £37 billion. However, the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has said that the coronavirus pandemic would have been a “heck of a lot worse” without the Test and Trace system. He said: “It certainly hasn’t been cheap fighting coronavirus, but it has absolutely been necessary. 9.1 million people have been contacted by Test and Trace. These are people who otherwise would be wandering round often unaware that they had coronavirus and spreading it around further. Whatever the coronavirus experience we have 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 chair of the PAC is the Labour MP Meg Hillier and she has said: “Yet 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”.
Labour’s Rachel Reeves has said: “It underlines the epic amounts of waste and incompetence, an overreliance on management consultants, taxpayers’ cash splashed on crony contracts, all while ministers insist our NHS heroes deserve nothing more than a clap and a pay cut”.
Current Affairs Correspondent | My name is Oliver Down I am 22, and a staunch brexiteer. I am a Bristolian lad who studied politics in Leicester. I believe in free speech and accurate journalism and I won’t be afraid to give you “the other side” of the story!
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