The government has made a mess of another IT project with the contact trace app? I don’t believe it

It turns out the unworkable app for following people around and telling them if they have been in close proximity to someone with coronavirus is unworkable. It works in South Korea, it was said, because people more often than not do what the government tells them.

But it didn’t work in the Isle of Wight because the app needed to be running all the time, or because it couldn’t tell if there was a brick wall between you and your next door neighbour. So the NHS decided to start again with another app, off the shelf from tech companies that know about these things, and Matt Hancock, the health secretary, assured us that our world-beating test, track and trace system would be ready to go on 1 June.

Which is just as well, because some of the scientists on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) say that we shouldn’t be opening our schools until test, track and trace is in place.

Now it “emerges”, as we journalists say, that the app won’t be ready, and isn’t part of the test, track and trace system. Lord Bethell, a health minister, said so in the House of Lords last night, but although anyone who knows how to turn a computer off and on again knew the app wouldn’t be ready, Boris Johnson managed to get through Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) without admitting it.

The prime minister was very pleased with how recruitment of tracers was going. When Keir Starmer asked when routine mass testing would start, Hancock was so keen that he answered on Johnson’s behalf, “It’s happening.” The speaker was annoyed enough to ask if he wanted to be thrown out.

But what is happening, the prime minister’s spokesperson has belatedly admitted, is that the test, track and trace system will be done by humans, asking other humans where they have been and who they have spent time with. The app, it was implied, was a bit of an optional extra that would be added to the scheme as a luxury feature at a later date.

Who could have believed that the British government could make a mess of an IT project? That was the sort of thing Labour governments did in the past, especially in the NHS. Matt Hancock was the kind of modern, digital-savvy Conservative who would bring the health service into the smartphone age.

You know, the Matt Hancock who put the Digital in the department of Culture, Media and Sport. The MP who had his own app so his constituents could track and trace everything he did for them. That Matt Hancock, who studied computing after his A-levels, and who worked for Border Business Systems, his father’s computer software company.

One of the things it does is “address management”. It is said to have developed the first systems that let you input a postcode and get a choice of addresses. Which sounds useful for track and trace.

But the app never worked, and most of the people who seem to know about these things never thought it would. So what on earth was the point of pretending that it was the centrepiece of the world-class contact tracing system the government was building?

Hancock has done himself unnecessary damage by not backing off the app as soon as it hit problems.

He could have said the whole point of doing the trial on the Isle of Wight was to identify problems and to see if it could work, but that, if it couldn’t, there were other ways of achieving the same objective, which is to identify anyone who has been in sustained contact with someone who has tested positive, and to isolate them.

You don’t need an app for that.