Lighthouse Labs – help or threat?

Boris Johnson told MPs in May that he was “confident” that the government would have a “world beating” system to test, track and trace people with the coronavirus infection by June 1st. I’m sure he hopes we’ve all forgotten that promise.

In September it remains clear that the test and trace system in Britain is a shambles, officially described as ‘barely functioning’ . Yet until we have a viable test, trace and isolate system in place, we cannot effectively fight the virus.

Never mind. We are promised  enough Lighthouse ‘super-labs’ will be in place soon to finally sort out the mess the Tories have made so far.

Where will the labs come from? The private sector! The Tories have roped in their mates on the case, beginning with Serco. Now as we, and many others, have pointed out Serco is a bunch of crooks who have had their hand in the public purse before.

All the same, the government started Serco off with a whack of £108m quid for testing. Serco for its part told their friends (“a network of sub-contractors”) to join the party – 44 in number. Most of these are the usual suspects you would expect to have their snouts in the trough - £850,000 to Accenture and £650,000 for McKinsey. Deloite was handed the contract for the Lighthouse Labs to be set up in Milton Keynes, Glasgow and Alderley Park. We have written about these contracts for mates before.  

So the lamentable performance of Britain’s testing and tracing is certainly not down to lack of money.

And is Britain short of medical research laboratories?  Not at all. Despite the rundown of the NHS and public sector over ten years of Tory rule, this country is world class in chemistry laboratories. And we still have 44 NHS labs doing the job.

So why not use them? One NHS worker asked: “I want to know why the new super-labs have been set up, because if they gave the NHS labs the resources they could easily to the tests. Our lab has been ready for ages to do large numbers of tests. We have the equipment and we have staff.” Good question.

The main purpose of building up the Lighthouse Labs is to undermine our National Health Service. Allyson Pollock, from the Centre for Excellence in Regulatory Science at Newcastle University, nails the issue. “This is another example of how public health has been marginalised. Why has Matt Hancock not put the [National Scrutiny] committee in charge of scrutiny all these proposals?

The government hides its failure behind a veil of secrecy. When Private Eye had the temerity to ask why a private firm was preferred to do the testing the very question was denounced as, “Communist propaganda”!

Have these commercial firms done a good job?

No. Accenture has still not delivered. Neither has McKinsey. The whole test and trace, of which the Lighthouse Labs project is a key part, is a racket. The new ‘super- labs’ are not yet in place. Given the speed at which the coronavirus is spreading, they will be much too late when they finally come on stream.

The report of the Open Contracting Partnership report is devastating as to the waste of government procurement, which cost £97m. “Companies with no relevant experience were awarded huge contracts for medical equipment, without transparency or competition... Supplies failed to arrive or did not meet the required standards, leaving medical staff without critical resources and costing lives.”

Medical professionals are worried about the impact of the Lighthouse Labs on the NHS. “Introducing these mass testing centres may only serve to increase competition for what are already scarce supplies and that NHS testing numbers will fall if their laboratories are competing with the testing centres for COVID-19 testing kits and reagents in a ‘Wild West testing’ scenario.”

The Lighthouse Labs are a threat to the NHS which has worked well for decades and continues to do sterling service – when it is not starved of resources. The labs are also a threat to the health and welfare of our people facing the threat of the pandemic.

If you’re sick of all this, start by signing the We Own It petition here.