Britain's £37bn test and trace system: did it do any good?

Britain built a system for testing for Covid-19 and tracking down contacts from a standing start – at a cost projected at £37bn. Why so expensive? And did it work? Simon Wilson reports.

Dido Harding
Dido Harding: did she really do such a bad job?
(Image credit: © Matthew Lloyd/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

What has happened?

Last week the House of Commons public-accounts committee – the parliamentary body that acts as a public-spending watchdog – issued a damning report into the government’s £37bn, NHS-branded “test and trace” (T&T) system. The report did accept that the programme, led by Dido Harding, has done an awful lot of testing and tracing. It found that between May 2020 and January 2021, the UK’s daily Covid testing capacity increased from around 100,000 to more than 800,000 tests. During that time, T&T contacted more than 2.5 million people testing positive in England, and advised more than 4.5 million of their associated contacts to self-isolate. Yet despite all that, and “despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project”, T&T “cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic”, the committee chairwoman, Meg Hillier, concluded. Moreover, “the promise on which this huge expense was justified – avoiding another lockdown – has been broken, twice”, she said. “Taxpayers cannot be treated by the government like an ATM machine. We need to see a clear plan and costs better controlled.”

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.