Stop them Stealing our Health Service
Allyson Pollock’s article (link below) in the Guardian (31.07.20) is a powerful indictment of the murderous incompetence of the Tory government in dealing with the pandemic, which has caused England to have the greatest number of excess deaths from Covid-19 in Europe.
In particular she points out the failures of the test and trace system. So far from being “world-beating” as the Prime Minister brags, it is a disgrace and means that, in the absence of a vaccine, we have no way of effectively combating the spread of the virus. Whatever happened to the miracle app, which was supposed to be the answer to all our problems?
This is not just stupidity. It is ideologically-driven stupidity. As Allyson points out the government has spent £10bn on private sector test and trace systems and only £300m on the public sector equivalent. The public health departments of local authorities have proved to be much more effective in doing the job. This is hardly surprising. They have been doing a similar job tracking and tracing tuberculosis and STDs for years. But they are crying out for the real-time information from the government that they need to stop the virus spreading.
So who have the Tories been showering our money on? Outfits like Serco, which has stolen money from the public purse in the past and should never be allowed to tender for public sector contracts ever again. See:
https://labourrep.com/blog/2020/6/19/serco-and-the-fiasco-of-tracing-covid-19
What does Serco do? They turn track and trace into a call centre operation, where low paid and barely trained operatives ring up people who may be infected and read from prepared scripts. We should not be surprised their results are so poor.
But the point is this. The pandemic is being used as an excuse by the Tories to privatise whole swathes of our National Health Service. It’s the same story with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
The government is using the emergency to slip contracts out without a proper tendering process, all too often to their mates. Fortunately the Good Law Project is on the case. Will they bring the Tories to account? We wish them well.
htps://goodlawproject.org/news/the-ppe-fiasco/
Good Law Project: PPE Fiasco
More details of PPE fiasco that left hundreds of doctors and nurses dead are starting to emerge.
Whilst our EU partners were putting together emergency procurement arrangements in late January, it wasn’t until March that Government put together an emergency scheme to protect our doctors and nurses and care workers.
By then the global market for PPE had tightened considerably and Government was having to play catch up – ditching the normal rules that secure good value for public money and which guard against corruption in the process. On 27 March Government opened its portal inviting tenders for PPE on the gov.uk website and received 24,000 offers from 16,000 suppliers. It spent – this is Government’s figure – a staggering £5.5bn. And, surprisingly, three of the biggest beneficiaries were companies specialising in pest control (PestFix), a confectionery wholesaler (Clandeboye) and an opaque private fund (Ayanda) owned through a tax haven.
Why? We do not know. And Government is not helping – it has ignored the usual rule that contracts should be published within 20 days.
But Good Law Project, working with EveryDoctor, means to find out. Our intention is to pursue judicial review claims in respect of the Pestfix, Clandeboye and Ayanda contracts. But we will keep these contracts under review – and we may substitute others if better examples emerge.
Litigation of this scale and importance is undeniably difficult and expensive. If you are able to support the legal challenge, you can do so here.
You can sign the petition to demand the Government publishes the PPE contracts:
https://actionnetwork.org/forms/ppe-procurement
