£10bn cost to the taxpayer of failed test and trace system

THE taxpayer has stumped up £10billion for the Government’s bungled test and trace system, it emerged last night.

Calls for an inquiry mounted after it emerged the taxpayer has also spent an “eye-watering” £15billion on PPE amid scrutiny of the Government’s procurement process. Campaigners blasted officials for an “enormous waste” of public money after PPE and the NHS’S bungled testing and contact tracing programmes accounted for almost four-fifths of extra health spending.

The £25 billion cost of the programmes revealed in documents for Rishi Sunak’s economy package is equivalent to the entire transport budget and 15 per cent of health spending. The head of Parliament’s public finances watchdog warned the Government would have to justify the huge price of PPE amid intense scrutiny over its procurement strategy.

Simon Festing, the chief executive of the British Healthcare Trades Association, said an inquiry into PPE spending would help to shed light on the decision-making process to inform future

procurement. Front-line workers faced shortages after a global scramble while some PPE contracts were awarded to firms with no history of supplying it.

“We’re concerned about what looks to us to be an enormous waste of vast sums of public money,” said Jo Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, which has issued judicial proceedings against the Government demanding a public inquiry into PPE. “There are questions about how the Government has chosen those to whom it has let the biggest contracts.”

A total of £32 billion in additional

support for the health service was provided in response to Covid-19.

Meg Hillier, chairman of Parliament’s public accounts committee, said the Government must justify the £15billion spent on PPE and present a detailed plan to ensure there would not be shortages in a second wave.

She added officials also have “questions to answer” over spending on testing and tracing programmes that “won’t be supporting the unlocking of the economy for some time to come”.

Christopher Snowdon, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, said the figures

were “eye-watering” and blamed the “lack of preparation” by health officials. “A global shortage made it inevitable that we would pay over the odds for PPE,” he said.

Think tanks and taxpayer campaign groups also blasted the Government over the spending on testing and tracing programmes.

Matthew Lesh, head of research at the Adam Smith Institute, said the amount spent on testing and tracing programmes was “astonishing”.

The Department of Health and Social Care was contacted for a response.