Jennifer, I didn't list the five companies,The British Medical Association did.The below is by Richard Brooks ,a Private Eye journalist.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/13/failure-test-trace-folly-huge-contracts-private-giants-ukThe failure of test and trace shows the folly of handing huge contracts to private giantsOutsourcing is costing the UK public purse billions – and ruining the state’s ability to function‘Success in contact-tracing is far lower in the central service outsourced to Serco than in the smaller number of more complex cases handled by local public health teams.’ The multibillion pound surge in outsourcing of public services during Covid-19 has attracted many headlines, but it is not just a public spending scandal. It is a vivid demonstration of our government’s inability to perform the essential roles society asks of it. Furthermore, this dependency on outsourcing to profit-driven companies undermines any promise to “build back better”.After drastic public health services cuts over the past decade – coupled with extensive outsourcing of procurement to commercial logistics companies – a stripped-down health service was under-resourced for the challenge of a pandemic. The only feasible response was what is increasingly the default choice across government: outsource the work required. Covid-19 has prompted a gold rush for government contracts not seen since the heady days of New Labour’s private finance initiative.The richest seam of all for the private companies cashing in has been the test and trace system, handed to Serco on contracts officially priced at up to £410m and to the French company Sitel for up to £310m (with other outsourcing behemoths such as G4S also getting in on the act). Such is the opacity of the arrangements, however, that no details of actual payments to these firms have yet been published. Approximate figures released by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, suggest the final bill will run into several billions of pounds.But it doesn’t end there. Contracts for managing the procurement of ventilators, PPE and even the job of keeping tabs on all these contracts – what might be thought of as core government responsibilities – have been awarded to battalions of management consultants for hundreds of millions of pounds.A crisis on the scale of Covid, even when the need to be prepared was clear, was always going to demand additional resources. But bringing in extra personnel is very different to farming out services wholesale, as the UK government has done. So the coordination of testing conducted by private sector staff has been performed not by health officials, but by consultants from Deloitte at an undisclosed but almost certainly much greater cost. Details reported by Private Eye last week show that junior Deloitte staff supplied to another public body, the British Business Bank (which operates Covid financial support packages), are costing the taxpayer salaries comparable to that of the prime minister.In the teeth of a public health crisis the direct financial cost is of course a secondary matter. Of more immediate concern is the quality of the service – but here again outsourcing proves calamitous. Handing over a central tracing service to 25,000 people with no experience and very little training in a skilled area, for example, demands that processes are standardised and computerised to the point of ineffectiveness, with all discretion removed. The results have been all too painful to see. Success in tracing the contacts of those testing positive is far lower in the central service outsourced to Serco et al (around 64%, at the latest count) than in the smaller number of more complex cases handled by local public health teams (over 97%). Better performance can be found in countries where a substantial public health service has remained at the core of the process. Germany’s well-established public health network was able to manage the efforts of thousands of extra tracers expertly.
Ben Gemmingen ● 2059d