A ‘circuit-breaker’ is needed but so is locally run covid test and trace

While the need for a “circuit-breaker” has never been clearer, the decision by Conservative government ministers to hand over management of testing in our community to private, for-profit providers has been disastrous.

To give a sense of the scale of the argument, while profit-making companies like Serco, Sitel and Deloitte have been given over £500 million for test and trace, the total that local public health teams the length and breadth of the country have received is £300 million between them.

We cannot afford the continuation of these catastrophic national blunders. Not one penny more should be given to the failing contracts in the private sector.

This scandalously wasted resource must be handed over to public health teams like the one here in Brighton and Hove which is helping effectively manage the pandemic despite a decade of savage government cuts.

These teams have the direct experience of helping with tracing food poisoning, for example, and crucially they have the knowledge to ensure they can understand our community far better than distant government ministers.

We are wary that government is demanding local test and trace capacity but without providing the resources we have long needed so that public health teams can do this well.

Once again, the fact that they have handed this to private companies remains truly an insult to all those working hard in the public interest.

The first line of defence in a public health epidemic is prevention but the impact of Conservative government cuts has left council social care and public health teams lacking resources to cope.

Research from the King’s Fund tells us public health funding has shrunk by a massive £850 million in real terms, compared with 2015-16.

But let’s be clear: the government’s handling of the entire pandemic has been nothing short of a scandal.

It started on Tuesday 3 March when the Prime Minister was warned no action would see 250,000 deaths. He delayed for 20 days while the infection spread from 14,000 people to 1.5 million.

In August, Public Health England was scapegoated for the multiple Tory government covid-19 failures through the pandemic while the new replacement body is led by someone with “no public health experience”.

In September it was discovered that thousands of people were taking tests that would never be analysed.

The Prime Minister promised that our testing programme would be “world beating” yet the reality was that it had a backlog of 185,000 swabs. Being so stretched, tests were being sent to labs in Italy and Germany!

Staff have been barely trained, patients sent to the other end of the country and a massive quantity of test results was lost.

Needless to say, several polls now indicate the public has negligible confidence in the private sector outsourcing of contact tracing.

And in recent weeks when, despite the resurgence of covid-19, we had the lowest weekly percentage of national contact tracing since Test and Trace began – and all this while local health protection teams managed to handle 97.1 per cent of contacts.

Now we have been informed that England’s test and trace service is being forced to draft in untrained staff to carry out patient assessments as the second wave of infections swamps the service.

Priorities can be summed up in the hefty contracts handed out to the chums of Conservative ministers

• £108 million for PPE (personal protective equipment) from a company with no experience
• £12 billion for a track and trace system that’s an embarrassment

…

At the same time, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick awarded £25 million from the Towns Fund to his own constituency of Newark (population 115,000 people) while Manchester (population 2.9 million) has only been offered £60 million.

The uneven growth of the pandemic in different areas proves that we need a local system of testing, contact tracing and quarantine more than ever.

For example, local contact tracers would use a local telephone number, in contrast to the 0300 numbers that many will not pick up. And in some circumstances, they could potentially be able to knock on doors.

This would enable Brighton and Hove to control the deadly coronavirus neighbourhood by neighbourhood, save lives and avoid further lockdown.

In turn, our communities can have confidence that councils will safeguard the public’s interests – not those of shareholders.

The scandal is that after all this time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock still haven’t introduced an effective system to test, trace and isolate those with covid-19 to help cities like ours effectively suppress the virus.

Finally, as the pandemic sadly shows no signs of remission and we have seen how councillors and communities have had little notice over imposed lockdown, we are calling for a robust system of engagement with councils about any restrictions to ensure that our communities are able to shape and respond to any proposed lockdown measures.

We cannot be complacent about covid and we must be clear: our increasing number of cases is a cause for serious concern.

Please … reduce your contacts, wash your hands, wear a mask, stick to social distancing and we can keep fighting this with everything we have.

Councillor Phélim Mac Cafferty is the Green leader of Brighton and Hove City Council.