Test and Trace to receive extra £15bn, bringing total funding to £37bn
The Test and Trace scheme is set to receive an extra £15bn, bringing its total funding over two years to £37bn.
The contact tracing scheme, which has been awarded £22bn so far, will receive a further £15bn over the next financial year.
The new figures were first revealed by the Huffington Post.
It also revealed that £20m a month will be allocated for a discretionary fund to help councils support people who can’t afford to self-isolate with Covid.
The Budget Red Book insists that “the UK has more capacity than any country in Europe and one of the highest per capita testing rates in the world”.
The figures emerged on the same day that the government revealed NHS staff will receive a mere one per cent pay rise in the coming year, in a move described by the nurses’ union as “pitiful”.
Test and Trace has seen a catalogue of errors since its inception, and has come under fierce criticism for paying private consultants £1,000-a-day for their work on the scheme.
The National Audit Office in November published a review into the contact tracing scheme, concluding that the government “needs to learn lessons” and that the service “is able to make a bigger contribution to suppressing the infection than it has to date”.
Baroness Dido Harding, who was appointed interim chief of the programme in August, has repeatedly stated that Test and Trace has helped drive down infection rates.
But modelling released last month showed that Test and Trace’s contact tracing efforts cut the R rate by as little as two per cent. It also suggested that testing helped curb the spread of coronavirus by between 18 and 33 per cent — equivalent to a 0.6 to 0.8 reduction in the R rate, though the figures could not be disentangled from the combined effect of people also self-isolating with symptoms.
The contact tracing scheme has also come under fire for tweaking its counting method to boost the number of “contacts reached” by Test and Trace. Shadow health minister Justin Madders told City A.M: “If the government had fixed Test and Trace when the sun was shining then perhaps we might not be in the dire position we find ourselves in now.”
Test and Trace faced fresh criticism today as Sky News revealed that its App had barely used all the check-in data from hundreds of millions of people who visited pubs, restaurants and hairdressers before lockdown.
A confidential report seen by Sky News admitted that “thousands of people” were not warned they might be at risk of infection, “potentially leading to the spread of the virus.”
Morning Wire revealed earlier this year that the scheme failed to reach more than 30,000 people who tested positive for coronavirus in the week before Christmas, at the same time the government warned that a new coronavirus mutation was spreading across the country.
The Prime Minister has said that leaving lockdown will rely on a huge boost in Covid tests, with Test and Trace gearing up to roll out a mass testing blitz once restrictions are lifted.
NHS Test and Trace is preparing to send out more than 400,000 rapid lateral flow tests by post each day in a bid to get the country back to normal.
The campaign — provisionally titled “Are you ready? Get testing. Go” — is set to be rolled out before children return to school next week.
Boris Johnson’s roadmap states: “As the virus becomes less prevalent, the Test, Trace and Isolate system will become ever more important in identifying local outbreaks rapidly, allowing the government to take swift action to manage them and respond to new variants of concern.”