Serco and the Fiasco of Tracing Covid-19
Right from the beginning the World Health Organization emphasised that the way to fight Covid-19 was to “test, trace and isolate,” From the word go the Tory government failed to follow this advice. In March they abandoned testing and tracing altogether. Now they are scrambling to put together a testing regime.
There is no point in testing people for the virus, unless you can go on to trace who the infected person has been in contact with and isolate them. Yet we are told the tracing regime will not be fully operational till September! This is a shambles and a disgrace.
Who have the Tories rushed to put in charge of the tracing system? It’s Serco. Serco’s boss is Rupert Soames. Yes, you clocked the surname right. Soames is a grandson of Winston Churchill, an old Etonian, a former member of the Bullingdon Club and a Tory grandee to the tips of his toes. Serco’s record with public service contracts is wretched. They have been fined £19m for fraud in relation to a contract for the electronic tagging of offenders. They laughed the fine off by calling it a ‘service credit’.
They should not be permitted to tender for government contracts ever again. Instead they have been awarded a mouthwatering contract worth £108m to run the tracing system. This is part of the ongoing Tory privatisation of our National Health Service, using the pandemic as an excuse. Many of these contracts are handed out to dodgy private firms, very often run by Tory donors, without even a proper tendering process.
Soames is bragging, “There are a few, a noisy few, who would like to see us fail because we are private companies delivering a public service...If it succeeds...it will go a long way in cementing the position of the private-sector companies in the public-sector supply chain.” Soames and his Tory chums understand the ideological significance of dishing out contracts to private firms to undermine the NHS. That’s much more important than doing their best to lick the pandemic, isn’t it?
The tracing contract handed out to Serco actually works out a bit more complicated than that. Serco dishes out sub-contracts to its mates to do the detail work – and they all have to take their cut. So there are four levels of profit taking in the tracing process and a spaghetti junction of private firms involved – all just looking after number one. No wonder it’s a mess.
The whole business is exposed in depth and detail in: Privatised and Unprepared: The NHS Supply Chain. A fundamentally dysfunctional system published by weownit.org.uk.The report shows the devastating impact privatisation of the NHS supply chain has had on the government's response to coronavirus
After reading the report Jeremy Corbyn tweeted:
This exposes the scandal of privatisation in the #NHS supply chain
#PPE items go through 4 levels of profit taking
Privatisation is part of the #PPEshortage story
Private companies continually fail to deliver Privatisation must end.
Serco’s failings are part of a much bigger story. Allyson Pollock, a professor of public health at Newcastle University, commented, “They’re basically trying to build a centralised, parallel, privatised system. As a result we’ve had far more deaths than we should have. And lockdown has had to go on much longer than in other countries because we’ve let the virus rip for so long.”
Labour MP Ben Bradshaw summed up, “It’s a total shambles. Everyone has accepted all the way through this crisis that the countries that have dealt with it best have always had effective track and trace systems in place, and that any country wishing to emerge from lockdown and live with this virus for the foreseeable future will need an effective track and trace system,” he said. “Yet, the history of this in Britain is a catalogue of disasters.”
This posting is based on the research of We Own It. See:
https://weownit.org.uk/save-lives-scrap-serco-now
