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.
An incisive piece about a Government which, all these months, has shown no ability to look ahead – something that should be the first lesson in leadership.
Just like the rest of Europe and most of the other Continents.
I would respectfully suggest that Phelim concentrates on getting the council to deliver basic services efficiently before suggesting they get involved with services which they have no experience of. Why for instance are parking permits taking weeks to be delivered? Why is the council failing to even clean graffiti of its own bins and properties making the town look like a tip. Why are they not cleaning up all the mess left by the junkies in the town centre. The town centre looks a mess and if people are going to retain existing jobs and get new jobs the council should be doing what they can to make Brighton a clean, nice place to visit and shop.
the only scandal is this moron being leader of b and h council – like his predecessor kwikcrap – they can’t run brighton so should keep their ill-informed and factually inaccurate views to themselves – he’s just an oaf and one great big pile of blubber and bull
For god’s sake do NOT let the council anywhere bloody near it.
Phelim, your mob can’t be trusted to run a bloody bath.
Hopeless. Hapless. Not fit for purpose.
Can’t actually believe that people can make a worse job of running this, now dump of a, town than Nancy and her jew hating morons but credit where it’s due, you’re showing that that IS possible.
GET OUT OF TOWN YOU IMBECILE.