Multimillion-pound contract extension for Test and Trace staff ahead of next wave

​Health Service Journal June 23rd 2021​

·         Contracts with suppliers for contact tracers extended by six months

·         Comes amid increasing international travel in and out of the UK, and impending new wave of covid cases

The Department of Health and Social Care has extended two contracts for contact tracers with outsourcing giants Serco and Sitel by six months for an additional cost of £168m.

Serco and Sitel have been supplying a pool of call centre operators for NHS Test and Trace since May 2020.

The contracts have been extended multiple times through the pandemic. This latest extension will take them from June up to the end of November 2021.

The contract tender notices pointed out the government lifted restrictions on 17 May, increasing the volume of international travel in and out of the UK. This increase in travel has coincided with “evidence of a third wave beginning, which is primarily being driven by prevalence of the Delta variant within the younger/unvaccinated population”.

Sitel’s extension will add £102m to its contract, making it worth nearly £398m in total. The extension will cover 4,000 full-time equivalent contact tracers and isolation assurance compliance call handlers from June to the end of August.

This will then rise to 4,800 FTE tracers and isolation assurance compliance staff. IAC call handlers call people who have arrived in the UK from overseas to ensure they are quarantining.

The Serco contract extension is for an additional £66m, increasing the total cost of its contract to over £424m. It covers 3,000 FTE contact tracers to the end of August, rising to 4,000 from September to the end of November.

The number of people employed as contact tracers has fluctuated over the past year, rising to 22,000 during the winter peak in covid cases but falling to around 14,000 in March as cases abated.

From Foxglove (June 8th 2021): UPDATE – GOVERNMENT DELAYS NHS DATA GRAB!

So far over 7,000 of you had signed the petition challenging Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s plans to create a massive new database for our health records – and share it with private companies. Today we’ve had some encouraging news which I wanted to update you about.

Alongside the petition, Foxglove formed a coalition of five organisations and an MP to take the government to court. We were busy preparing to seek an urgent injunction to force a delay but today the government announced it is extending the deadline for people to opt-out of the NHS Data Grab. Under pressure, they’ve been forced to move the deadline to 1st September!

This is an important step, but we still have a lot of questions that we need answers to: how will patients be notified, including people who aren’t online? They are promising to store our health data in a “trusted research environment” – but how will that work, who gets access and on what terms? What will corporations be allowed to do with our health data?

The government may be hoping that this delay means people lose interest – so we need to keep up the pressure and stay laser focused on protecting privacy and preventing privatisation of our NHS data without people’s say so.  

We don’t have all the answers yet. We’re expecting the government to provide some more detail within the next couple of days. As soon as we have it, we’ll do a detailed analysis and consult with experts and partners. We will keep you updated as soon as we know more.  

This is by no means the end of this campaign, but it is progress – and it’s only happened thanks to the public pressure we’ve all created – so thanks for being part of it.

We’ll be back in touch soon,

Best wishes,

Martha

co-founder, Foxglove

GOOD LAW PROJECT: WE WON!

(June 9th 2021)

Michael Gove broke the law by giving a contract to a communications agency run by long time associates of him and Dominic Cummings, the High Court has decided.

The Court found that the decision to award the £560,000 contract to Public First was tainted by “apparent bias” and was unlawful. The Court found that Gove’s:

“failure to consider any other research agency… would lead a fair minded and informed observer to conclude that there was a real possibility, or a real danger, that the decision maker was biased” (paragraph 168).

Michael Gove had claimed that the work was such that only Public First could carry it out. However, the High Court rejected that version of events. The simple truth, it held, was that the Cabinet Office didn’t even consider whether anyone else should have the contract.

The decision vindicates Good Law Project’s long-running characterisation of pandemic procurement as “institutionalised cronyism”.

Emails released in the case also showed that both Michael Gove and Number 10 were keen that Public First (and Hanbury) should win no-tender polling contracts. Good Law Project’s judicial review of the decision to award a contract to Hanbury will be heard on 26 July.

The decision is the second in our long slate of crowdfunded procurement judicial reviews – and we have succeeded in both. Two Cabinet Ministers – Michael Gove and Matt Hancock – have now been found to have broken the law.

Following the first decision, Good Law Project wrote to Matt Hancock making proposals to improve procurement and get better value for money for taxpayers. We offered, if that invitation was accepted, to drop our further procurement challenges to save public money. Mr Hancock did not respond. Since that letter, huge further sums in public money have been wasted in fruitless defence of unlawful conduct.

Good Law Project repeats its invitation to the Government to learn lessons – and to stop wasting more public money staving off political embarrassment.

Good Law Project is grateful to its legal team of Jason Coppel QC and Patrick Halliday of 11KBW Chambers, instructed by Rook Irwin Sweeney. And of course to the tens of thousands of people whose financial contributions make litigation like this possible.

We are the arrow but you draw the bow.

Thank you,

Jo Maugham
Director of Good Law Project