- I inform the House that Mr Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.
- 4:17 pm
- I beg to move,That this House notes the consistently high performance of local contact tracing systems when compared with the centralised system established by the Government; notes the wealth of evidence that the considerable sums of public money spent so far on the national system would deliver better public health outcomes if devolved to local authorities and public health experts; and calls on the Government to extend the additional funding for contact tracing available in Tier 3 areas to all parts of the country and ensure that councils and local public health teams receive the resources and powers they require.This Government are obsessed with a failed model of outsourcing. It is failing to reach people who come into contact with someone with the virus, it is not getting information to local councils who need to act on it, and it is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money that could be spent on a local response using local expertise. It is not too late for the Government to change course, and I urge them to do so today.Yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition made the case for a short, sharp circuit break of restrictions lasting two to three weeks to firmly apply the brakes on the rising infection numbers that we are seeing. A crucial aim of the circuit break is to drive down infections, but there is another purpose as well: it would buy the Government some crucial time to fix the failures in contact tracing.The current model of contact tracing is broken and it will get worse, not better, while corporations such as Serco are allowed in the driving seat rather than local public health teams. We might ask: how bad is the Government’s approach to contact tracing?One director of public health said:“It needs someone with the courage to say”it “isn’t working”, and it was described as a“catastrophe…the very worst system I’ve…seen”.Well, we do have the courage to say that it is not working, and I urge the Government to have that courage.
- My hon. Friend is right to highlight Serco. Does she agree that another problem with test and trace is the number of consultants being employed, with more than a thousand from one firm alone—Deloitte—which charges several thousand pounds a day for its senior consultants? Should we not be told how much it is costing and what these people are doing?
- My hon. Friend makes his point well. He has been a staunch advocate of transparency and value for money in the delivery of public services. The Government’s own Minister in the Cabinet Office in the other place has made those points as well, saying that the Government are spending too much money on consultants when that work could be done in-house with better value for taxpayers. I very much agree with my hon. Friend’s comments.The minutes of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies meeting from three weeks ago on 21 September, as well as suggesting a circuit break to deal with the rising infection numbers, reflected on the performance of the Government’s approach to test, trace and isolate. The minutes said that“relatively low levels of engagement with the system…coupled with testing delays…is having a marginal impact on transmission”.All that money spent, yet this key part of the Government’s system to keep us safe is only having a marginal impact on transmission.
- Does the hon. Lady not accept that this is a unique situation? This is one of the worst crises that this country has ever faced, and I invite her to assist the Government, rather than constantly opposing every measure that the Government are taking in what is an extremely challenging situation.
- That is exactly why I am urging the Government to use the local expertise we have in all our local authorities around the country. We should not reinvent the wheel, but use that local expertise, rather than wasting hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.The Prime Minister promised a world-beating test and trace system, yet we have one that is barely functioning. We have a system that is now so broken that SAGE is saying it is making next to no difference. We are all paying the price for these terrible mistakes. The truth is that as soon as the Government looked to a privatised solution, a political choice was made about how to respond to a public health crisis.Serco is not integrated into the fabric of any of our communities. Ministers could have spoken to the Local Government Association. They could have spoken to the Association of Directors of Public Health. Instead, they chose to speak to Serco. There is a cosiness between the Conservative Government and these outsourcing companies, despite their failures to deliver.Let us look at Serco’s record. Last year, Serco was fined £23 million as part of a settlement with the Serious Fraud Office over electronic tagging contracts. In December, two former senior executives at Serco were charged for that offence. In 2018, Serco was fined £2.8 million after it was revealed that it was providing asylum seekers with squalid, unsafe slum housing.One would think that whenever Serco bids for a contract, sirens would be going off all over Whitehall, except that Serco did not bid for the contact tracing contract. It was handed it on a plate, with no competition, no rigour and no transparency. Ministers may claim that it is a coincidence that hundreds of millions of pounds of public contracts have been awarded to companies with clear links to the Conservative party, including Serco. That would be a heck of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?
- I am glad to see the old tendency is back in the Opposition of private bad, public good. With the hon. Lady’s proposal around local authorities wanting to do more on test and trace, presumably they would not be doing it for free. They would have to be paid, and it would cost a lot of money. Presumably she has costed that. Will she just put on the record for the House at what price she has costed that?
- Let us be clear: there are places that are doing this—for example, Wales, to which I shall come later—and the difference between what we see with Serco and what we see when it is done in-house is that with the latter more people are being traced, which means more people going into self-isolation and a slower spread of the virus. That protects all our lives and means that our economy can get back on track. The Government are the ones who are wasting hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on a system that is failing—a system that is letting us down.Outsourced contact tracing is part of £11 billion of public procurement in this pandemic that has not gone out to competitive tender. The Government do not even know whether they are getting value for money because they do not even bother to test it in the marketplace or against what local authorities can deliver. For the outsourcing companies this is a gold rush. I have called for the National Audit Office to investigate, and I look forward to its findings later this year. I am sure that all Members will look forward to the findings from that investigation so that they can check for themselves that they are getting the value for money that they seem to believe they are getting.One issue that I hope the National Audit Office will address is the murky subcontracting of the Government’s contractors. My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) asked the Government how many companies Serco had subcontracted its work on contact tracing to; the answer was 29 companies other than Serco. The amount subcontracted to other firms represents 85% of staffing. Who are these businesses? The Government have refused to say—because Serco decided that it was too commercially sensitive. We now have a Government who outsource even decisions to private outsourcing companies. The situation is frankly ludicrous.It has taken investigative journalists, whistleblowers and the Good Law Project to start to piece together the jigsaw. Why the shyness? Presumably because if the Government revealed what was going on, it would not stand up to public scrutiny. One business to which Serco has subcontracted work is Concentrix, which was previously involved in scandals relating to tax credits.
- I fear that the hon. Lady may have inadvertently misled the House earlier. She told the House that the Government did not speak to local government authorities throughout the country, but on 22 May, many months before Labour even started to talk about involving local authorities, the Government provided £300 million for local authorities to set up local test and trace services, so what she said at the Dispatch Box was patently untrue and she should apologise.
- Local councils are desperate to take on the responsibilities from Serco. They are begging the Government: “Hand over the resources and the responsibilities, because we can do it better than you.” I will come later to the issues relating to what the Government are doing with tier 3 compared with the other tiers.
- My hon. Friend and parliamentary neighbour is making an excellent speech. If local authorities undertake similar procurement, they have to utilise best value and have a social value framework. If they conducted procurement as the Government have, the Government would bring in commissioners. This is an absolute scandal.
- I could not agree more. My hon. Friend will know that in Leeds, which we both have the privilege of representing, given the expertise we have on the ground, our local authority and director of public health could be doing a much better job than Serco is doing. Indeed, when we have had local outbreaks in Leeds, it has been the local authority going out and knocking on doors to ensure that people know what is going on—something that Serco cannot or does not do.
- The hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) said that £300 million had been given to local authorities to do tracking and tracing. My recollection is that it was not given for that purpose. It was given to local authorities to help them develop outbreak control plans and set up outbreak control committees. There has never been any general amount of money given to local authorities to do tracking and tracing. That has been a demand, but it has not been responded to by the Government.
- I thank my hon. Friend the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, who is better informed than most in the House.In the last Parliament, I had the honour of chairing the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, and it was a privilege to see the work of so many businesses, which are the backbone of our economy. I also chaired the inquiry into the collapse of Carillion—a house of cards built through outsourced contracts from Government. When I see the endless contracts and the enormous sums of money handed over today to outsourcing companies, I cannot but conclude that the Government have learnt none of the lessons from that collapse and that failure. It makes me really angry that, despite all the work done and all the evidence presented, the same thing is happening again.There are clear alternatives, and there always were. The World Health Organisation issued clear guidance for contact tracing, which states:“Critical elements of the implementation of contact tracing are community engagement and public support”.That should have been the model for England, so why was it not? We do not need to travel halfway round the world for a successful alternative. We can look to Wales—a model where contact tracing is devolved to local communities. In the most recent figures for Wales, of the 2,190 positive cases that were eligible for follow-up, 91% were reached and asked to provide details of their recent contacts. Of the 10,516 contacts, 83% were successfully contacted. That is in stark contrast with the Government’s Serco model, in which just 69% of contacts were reached—a figure that is getting worse week in, week out.Perhaps if the Welsh Government were a private outsourcing consultancy, the Government would have paid them a small fortune to take over the system in England. Instead, the Government turned to outside consultants, paid £563,000 of public money this summer for producing a report on test and trace—a report that we have all paid for, but none of us has seen. The Government could have learned valuable lessons for free. They could have gone to Mark Drakeford rather than to McKinsey.
- Will my hon. Friend give way?
- I will make some progress and the conclude to give others time to speak.Ten years of austerity, fragmentation and privatisation have left our country less resilient to face a pandemic like this. Public health budgets have been slashed by cuts from central Government. Sustained new investment is needed to rebuild our public services during this crisis and beyond. The Government have squandered enormous sums of money on a centrally dictated outsourcing model, and Ministers should hang their heads in shame because it has failed.The consequence of this failure means we are not getting the virus under control after months of sacrifice by the British people, so my message today is simple: sack Serco and give those resources to local councils, save lives, protect livelihoods, and learn these lessons before it is too late.
- Before I call the Minister to respond, I give notice that we will start with a time limit of five minutes for Back-Bench speeches, and it is likely to be reduced quite soon.