It isn’t too late to turn test & trace into the ‘world-beating’ system we were promised

The National Audit Office is a long-established arm of government, dating back to Victorian times and earlier, and one of the principal pillars to protect the public against waste and malfeasance in the use of taxpayers’ funds. As a body entirely independent of government, it reports to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, the most prestigious of all the backbench committees in parliament. Its latest report, and its second, into the test and trace system, is temperate and measured, but there is no mistaking the message between the understated lines. Britain’s attempts to build a working test and trace system have failed – though that has been apparent to even a casual observer for some time.

A working app does seem to have been developed, but its painful development last year was a saga of missed opportunities and digi-bungling. The vast budget of £22bn has in fact been underspent, by around £9bn, and the system built has been only partially effective. A disappointing number of Covid tests are even notified to the authorities (about one in seven), or result in isolation and tracing and isolation of contracts (and the Covid test and trace kit reporting guidelines could be much clearer). Cooperation with public health officials in local authorities has been patchy and disappointing. Targets have been missed.

As so often, the official response is a reorganisation. NHS Test and Trace is to be subsumed into a new UK Health Security Agency – despite public health being a devolved matter. Meanwhile, Matt Hancock is bringing control of the NHS back into the Department of Health. As the NAO concludes, the government and NHS need to set out plans to make test and trace work, if only to deal with the next epidemic.

The failures of test and trace also need to be put in context. The whole point of the lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021, before the vaccine programme picked up speed, was to buy time while a suitable effects system of test, track and isolate could be implemented, in line with the promised “world-beating” app. Thus, when restrictions were lifted and cases inevitably started to rise, the spread could be blocked by rapid local action, as had happened in countries such as South Korea and Germany. Britain’s repeated failures meant that lockdowns lasted longer, were more severe and inflicted more economic damage than they otherwise would.

The loss of life and damage to health from long Covid was also correspondingly worse. The NAO does not apportion precise blame among No 10, the NHS, Matt Hancock, Dido Harding and the many others involved – but that remains a legitimate matter of public concern. Other countries did it better, and the failures were not inevitable.

Although there continues to be considerable disquiet in some circles at the government’s laggardly approach to setting up a full public inquiry into its handling of the crisis, there is in fact no shortage of valuable research into the events of the last 15 months or so. Parliamentary select committees, the NAO reports, evidence from the likes of Dominic Cummings, media scrutiny, leaks and the statistical evidence publicly available have all already helped to explain why the UK has suffered one of the highest rates of death from Covid among comparable nations. Despite the visible successes of the vaccination programme, the signs are that the Delta variant is already dominant and pushing case numbers alarming high, if not the mortality rate. The NAO report proves that it is certainly not too soon for lessons to be learned and to put things right, even if a full public inquiry will have to wait.