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| - A tweet shared almost 5,000 times and cross-posted on Facebook seems to raise questions about Test and Trace, asking why a £22 billion contract was given to a company which has been prosecuted twice for fraud by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). The question is accompanied by a picture of Baroness Dido Harding, who ran Test and Trace until April 2021.
The figure refers to the budget allocated to Test and Trace for its first year of operation. Of this, about £13.5 billion was spent.
It’s unclear which “company” is being referred to in the post, but it is false to suggest the entire budget was handed to a single company.
Test and Trace involves a number of public and private organisations, including the NHS, local authorities, public health authorities, laboratories and contractors.
The post may be referring to Serco, which has been the focus of much scrutiny relating to Test and Trace during the pandemic.
In 2013, Serco agreed to repay around £70 million to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) after overcharging on its contract to provide electronic tagging of offenders.
Following a 2019 investigation into Serco subsidiary, Serco Geografix Limited (SGL), and its underreporting of the profits made from the electronic tagging services, the SFO said: “SGL will pay a financial penalty of £19.2 million, and the full amount of the SFO’s investigative costs (£3.7m). This is an addition to the £12.8m compensation already paid by Serco to the MoJ as part of a £70m civil settlement in 2013.”
These may be the two cases referred to in the Facebook post.
During the first year of Test and Trace, to March 2021, Serco had a contract valued at £623 million for running test sites and contact tracing, not £22 billion.
The post goes on to ask why Baroness Harding approved the money for an “11 year old excel [sic] spreadsheet”.
This refers to the discovery in autumn 2020 that Public Health England had been using an old Microsoft Excel file format to report case figures that did not have sufficient capacity to handle the volume of data required.
As such, in the week to 2 October 2020, over 15,000 cases went unreported.
The post then says £15 billion more was spent to “make it not work”. The figure of £15 billion is the allocated budget for Test and Trace in the 2021/22 financial year.
It is not the amount spent on changing a spreadsheet file format.
The post ends by asking “where did all this money go?” Details on the finances of Test and Trace are available from the National Audit Office which produces regular reports on the programme and its spending.
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