Vaccination rollout vs track & trace: outsourcing and the NHS

[two sheds]

Who's "they" in this context?

Whoever it was in the government who made the decision.

And do you know enough about what happened, to know that this is what happened?

No I don't, it seems pretty bloody likely though. It would be totally alien to Conservative government thinking for a start. Did you see any government initiatives to attract people into the NHS to carry out track & trace? I didn't, and you'd have thought they would be pretty visible - by definition.

I've answered your questions, how about you answer:

How much experience of test&trace did those private companies have before being given the contracts? Did they have to take on a large number of new staff and set them to it? Where did they find these people? Or did they already have a bunch of people sitting around twiddling their thumbs who happened to have the right knowledge and experience to start setting up a new system?

And any comment on:

And again the test & trace app they tried to set up failed. So much for them setting up a new system

 

[Spandex]

What does that actually mean, though, "pumped into NHS"?

The vaccination programme is being run in three kinds of places: hospital hubs; local GPs, primary care networks and pharmacy teams; and the big vaccination centers. The first two of these are existing parts the wider NHS. The 50 (?) Vaccination centres are obviously not NHS sites (stadiums, exhibition centers, etc).

The vaccination programme is mostly staffed by current or former NHS staff or other former medics.

It is built with and upon existing NHS people and infrastructure. The NHS is, of course, a muddle of state and private organisations, so what exactly counts as NHS is a flexible concept.

The UK COVID-19 vaccines delivery plan gives an overview of the programme.

I think it's entirely fair to compare it with the test & trace programme. That's where people need to be clear what they're talking about. The test bit, after a slow start and some bumps along the way has largely been quite successful. The trace bit hasn't.

Where contact tracing has gone wrong is not building upon the existing council run test and trace services, instead setting up a completely new one full of inexperienced and sometimes poorly trained staff.

I think there's been a difference of approach from the heads of the test & trace and vaccine service. Both have had to build huge programmes that didn't previously exist but while Dido Harding looked to start from scratch using private companies away from existing provision, Kate Bingham looked to existing provision, largely within the NHS, to build upon. Bingham generally seems to have been more competent than Harding so far. Her background as a venture capitalist has seen her work closely with numerous pharmaceutical companies over the years and she seems to know what's what. Harding's checkered background at Thomas Cook, Manpower, Kingfisher, Woolworths and Talktalk hardly gave her any insight into contract tracing.

 

[two sheds]

Great post, thanks (you may have noticed that I'm struggling here )

Where contact tracing has gone wrong is not building upon the existing council run test and trace services, instead setting up a completely new one full of inexperienced and sometimes poorly trained staff.

Yes the accounts I've seen of the training they've been given show that it's perfunctory at best.

And the question of where could we get the staff - fucking huge number of unemployed who aren't as far as I'm aware feckless lazy unskilled bastards but have been largely laid off from skilled jobs to inflate profits at the companies they've worked for. That was what attracted me to Corbyn - full employment by training people up to make use of a fantastic resource that at the moment is just wasted (and expensively wasted).

Similar with the PPE fiasco - what level of incompetence farms out PPE ordering to private companies with no medical experience so that millions of pieces of PPE aren't good for use and have to be thrown out.

 

[teuchter]

Whoever it was in the government who made the decision.



No I don't, it seems pretty bloody likely though. It would be totally alien to Conservative government thinking for a start. Did you see any government initiatives to attract people into the NHS to carry out track & trace? I didn't, and you'd have thought they would be pretty visible - by definition.

I've answered your questions, how about you answer:



And any comment on:

I can't really answer your questions because I don't claim to know the answers. I don't really know anything about the details of how things work, either 'within' the NHS (whatever that means) or when a third party contractor is involved. For example, if Serco get a contract to operate part of the T&T system I don't really know what they actually then do. Are they just a few management people in an office who gather together a bunch of people willing to take on short term job contracts? Or do they have a pool of permanent employees that they designate to whatever projects they take on? I don't know. I might assume that higher-level medical decision making would remain fully with experienced people in the NHS or public health bodies. To what extent do companies like Serco actually just move a bunch of portacabins and generators to some carparks somewhere, and set an arrangement with some security guards? Do they actually train any of the people doing quasi-medical roles or do they just set up the phone systems they use? I don't know.

My question is to those who seem to be making quite confident statements about how the vaccine programme has gone well because it's not been outsourced. It's those making confident statements about this who ought to be able to back them up with some detail on what actually happens.

If it's true that the T&T programme could have been a lot more successful if the financing had somehow been routed more through the NHS (whatever that means) then I'd like someone to explain to me what that alternative method of implementation would have looked like, exactly. As it is, I get the impression people are just saying this stuff when they actually have no more idea than I do, about how all this works, or what's actually happened.

Going back to the Isle of Wight T&T app you mention - I don't get what your point is. I thought that first attempt was managed mainly by the NHS, rather than giving the job to Apple/Google. It seems to have failed, and eventually it was Apple/Google who did it. So isn't that an example of something being done "in house" and then failing? And ending up having to be done by third parties?

 

[teuchter]

Where contact tracing has gone wrong is not building upon the existing council run test and trace services,

What did these existing council run test and trace services look like? As in, what were they doing pre-Covid and at what scale?

 

[two sheds]

If it's true that the T&T programme could have been a lot more successful if the financing had somehow been routed more through the NHS (whatever that means) then I'd like someone to explain to me what that alternative method of implementation would have looked like, exactly. As it is, I get the impression people are just saying this stuff when they actually have no more idea than I do, about how all this works, or what's actually happened.

What do you think I and particularly Spandex have been trying to do? I've never really noticed you doing this before and wondered why you got so much stick on urban.

My last 'discussion' with you was about the government giving out billions of pounds of contracts to companies with conservative links with no competitive tendering. You said that people were claiming this but nobody had innumerated the claims - right after posts showing that the Good Law Project had been innumerating the claims.

Then when it was shown that a major tory donor had got contracts with no competitive tendering you said to the effect of 'ah well if you're going to bring up any company with contacts to the tory party ...' .I was at that point in the process of counting up the contracts that the Good Law Project had shown had been given to tory mates, and I thought - this is no fucking use is it?

You're being disingenuous and I've discovered there's no real point in trying to engage. Go off and study it yourself instead of wasting peoples' time.

 

[Pickman's model]

What did these existing council run test and trace services look like? As in, what were they doing pre-Covid and at what scale?

i should point out that the clue is in the name

 

[Spandex]

What did these existing council run test and trace services look like? As in, what were they doing pre-Covid and at what scale?

They are part of the environmental health teams. Pre-Covid they used contact tracing in cases of things like norovirus, salmonella or legionnaires’ disease. When they've been used tracing Covid their experience and local knowledge has enabled them to contact over 90% of people as opposed to Baroness Harding's test and trace contacting around 60%.

 

[teuchter]

They are part of the environmental health teams. Pre-Covid they used contact tracing in cases of things like norovirus, salmonella or legionnaires’ disease. When they've been used tracing Covid their experience and local knowledge has enabled them to contact over 90% of people as opposed to Baroness Harding's test and trace contacting around 60%.

I wouldn't doubt that they would be better at doing their job than a newly set-up operation. That doesn't seem surprising. But what kind of numbers were involved, pre-covid, vs the period after? Would these environmental teams have had to double their staff, treble it, ten times as many? Would they actually have been able to do that?

 

[teuchter]

What do you think I and particularly Spandex have been trying to do? I've never really noticed you doing this before and wondered why you got so much stick on urban.

I'm afraid your answers (on this subject) mainly seem to be just woolly re-statements of your general opinion which we already know. I don't get the impression that you know much more about the details of how it all works than I do. The answers from Spandex I have found more useful.

 

[Spandex]

I wouldn't doubt that they would be better at doing their job than a newly set-up operation. That doesn't seem surprising. But what kind of numbers were involved, pre-covid, vs the period after? Would these environmental teams have had to double their staff, treble it, ten times as many? Would they actually have been able to do that?

I don't know exact figures, but this isn't some whim of mine. When the national contact tracing was set up there were plenty of newspaper articles bemoaning the fact that local contract tracers weren't used, the LGA has called for their increased use, it was debated in Parliament last October and has been happening in various places around the country for months.

 

[Sue]

UK missed coronavirus contact tracing opportunity, experts say

Thousands of council workers could have been deployed by the government but were not asked

www.theguardian.com

 

[two sheds]

I'm afraid your answers (on this subject) mainly seem to be just woolly re-statements of your general opinion which we already know. I don't get the impression that you know much more about the details of how it all works than I do. The answers from Spandex I have found more useful.

I've made specific suggestions, which you've ignored. And you've ignored the bulk of the points Spandex has made, too. You're not interested in this, you're just trolling and time wasting.

 

[teuchter]

I don't know exact figures, but this isn't some whim of mine. When the national contact tracing was set up there were plenty of newspaper articles bemoaning the fact that local contract tracers weren't used, the LGA has called for their increased use, it was debated in Parliament last October and has been happening in various places around the country for months.

Ok, so the best source of information I've found so far is this report from the NAO:

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The-governments-approach-to-test-and-trace-in-England-interim-report.pdf

The general story is one of a very large, centralised operation being set up at the outset. There is this commentary in that report:

NHST&T built on the central delivery model already being developed for testing. It also extended this to tracing, in conjunction with the existing PHE capacity. The government planned for a very rapid scaling up of tracing capacity. A range of stakeholders have queried why the government did not involve local authorities more in its initial approach to tracing, given their previous experience in this area. We have seen evidence that in April and May the Department considered, but ruled out as unfeasible, obtaining the call handler resources it needed from existing civil service staff and central government call centres, but not whether it could make use of local authority capacity for this. NHST&T told us that, in the time available, the only feasible approach was to focus first on building up tracing capacity centrally. A retrospective business case in September noted that the option of fully localised delivery (with no national capacity) would neither sufficiently reduce transmission levels nor provide value for money but it did not consider other forms of localised model. Local government stakeholders expressed concern that they had not been sufficiently engaged on the design and implementation of test and trace services. NHST&T has sought local engagement and feedback in a number of ways, including senior-level secondments from local authorities, advisory groups such as its local authority design group, and activities such as the pilots for mass testing and door-to-door testing (paragraphs 1.6 to 1.9 and 2.24).

Rightly or wrongly they seem to have believed that it was more feasible to build up central capacity rapidly, than it was to build on existing local capacity rapidly.

The longer term picture sems fairly clear - it was recognised that local knowledge/capacity needed to be used more, and that was reflected in changes in the way the system worked throughout 2020, with the number of call handlers being employed by the national service being reduced by around a third in the autumn.

There's this table which shows the change in numbers over the course of May-October:




That table doesn't seem to include contact tracers employed by local authorities - who as far as I can make out, are now handling a greater proportion of the work. So it's hard to see how the numbers compare. The national service still operates with quite a large number of people though.

A lot of this argument seems to be about the wisdom of setting up a central "national" system rather than building up at a local level. The change in approach since the initial stages seems to confirm that the initial idea was indeed over-centralised. The report looks at what other countries have done, and comments that most of them did not try to do this.

My question is whether it's the "outsourcing" as such that was the strategic error, or was it the excessively centralised approach.

That's why I would like to understand what it would have looked like, if the initial approach had been much more focused on local contact tracing operations. Given the seemingly very large number of extra people that would suddenly be required, would that have had to involve some form of "outsourcing" too? The government appears to have decided that this rapid expansion at a local level was not feasible and of course they might have been wrong.

To me it looks like the situation with the vaccine rollout is rather different because effectively there's been nearly a year to prepare for it, and mass vaccination is something that happens in any normal year. The contact tracing operation involved recruiting 18,000 people only a couple of months after the start of the pandemic.

 

[Spandex]

Ok, so the best source of information I've found so far is this report from the NAO:

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The-governments-approach-to-test-and-trace-in-England-interim-report.pdf

The general story is one of a very large, centralised operation being set up at the outset. There is this commentary in that report:


Rightly or wrongly they seem to have believed that it was more feasible to build up central capacity rapidly, than it was to build on existing local capacity rapidly.

The longer term picture sems fairly clear - it was recognised that local knowledge/capacity needed to be used more, and that was reflected in changes in the way the system worked throughout 2020, with the number of call handlers being employed by the national service being reduced by around a third in the autumn.

There's this table which shows the change in numbers over the course of May-October:


View attachment 252572

That table doesn't seem to include contact tracers employed by local authorities - who as far as I can make out, are now handling a greater proportion of the work. So it's hard to see how the numbers compare. The national service still operates with quite a large number of people though.

A lot of this argument seems to be about the wisdom of setting up a central "national" system rather than building up at a local level. The change in approach since the initial stages seems to confirm that the initial idea was indeed over-centralised. The report looks at what other countries have done, and comments that most of them did not try to do this.

My question is whether it's the "outsourcing" as such that was the strategic error, or was it the excessively centralised approach.

That's why I would like to understand what it would have looked like, if the initial approach had been much more focused on local contact tracing operations. Given the seemingly very large number of extra people that would suddenly be required, would that have had to involve some form of "outsourcing" too? The government appears to have decided that this rapid expansion at a local level was not feasible and of course they might have been wrong.

To me it looks like the situation with the vaccine rollout is rather different because effectively there's been nearly a year to prepare for it, and mass vaccination is something that happens in any normal year. The contact tracing operation involved recruiting 18,000 people only a couple of months after the start of the pandemic.

Sorry for taking a while to reply to you, I've been busy with kids, work, kids, housework and kids. And I apilogise for not finding the time to read and digest the 81 page NAO report you linked to.

What you seem to be getting at is that it was the centralised nature of Baroness Harding's contract tracing system rather than the outsourcing. Let's have a glimpse of what that outsourcing looked like:

Serco Have Subcontracted Contact Tracing Jobs To The Company Embroiled In The Tax Credits Scandal And Debt Collection Companies

So NHST&T gave £108 million to Serco, who took their cut and then subcontracted the work to various organisations, not all of whom have been revealed, but included debt collection agencies and Concentrix, the US firm that was sacked by the government over the tax credit scandal that saw almost 90 per cent of appealing claimants win their case.

No surprise it wasn't a success.

But where would those 18,000 contract tracers have come from?

NAO finds Test and Trace outsourcing saw ‘substantial resources spent on staff providing minimal services’

The NAO said that by mid-June, the so-called “utilisation rate” for those staff – reflecting the proportion of time they worked during their paid hours – was just 1%, effectively meaning they had little work to do.

Seems they didn't need 18,000 contact tracers. And as you note, from August they've been reducing numbers and relying more on local authorities to do the work. Why did it take until August? Did it take that long to notice, even though the approach was criticised from day one, or because:

The watchdog said DHSC had “no flexibility to reduce the number of call handlers under the original contracts” and had to wait until they had run their three-month initial course before it could negotiate new terms

Seems it was because they were bound by the contract they'd entered into.

While the desire for a centralised approach may have been part of the problem, I think that outsourcing was a problem too.

I'll put my cards on the table: I'm not a fan of outsourcing. It's a way for private business to extract profit from areas where there's no traditional profits to be made while governments can save money by reducing workers' pay and conditions by making it not their problem. It's an ideological position sold as efficiency.

 

[two sheds]

This (and more) is also relevant from Sue 's link. There was capacity there in councils that wasn't called on, although it doesn't say whether they were twiddling their thumbs.

The government has been accused of missing an opportunity after it failed to deploy 5,000 contact tracing experts employed by councils to help limit the spread of coronavirus.

Environmental health workers in local government have wide experience in contact tracing, a process used to prevent infections spreading and routinely carried out in outbreaks such as of norovirus, salmonella or legionnaires’ disease. But a spokesperson for Public Health England (PHE), which leads on significant outbreaks, said the organisation did not call upon environmental health workers to carry out contact tracing for coronavirus, instead using its own local health protection teams.

According to the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health the UK has, at a conservative estimate, 5,000 environmental health officers working in local councils nationwide.

The institute’s Northern Ireland director, Gary McFarlane, said government health bodies “absolutely should be drawing on the skills set of EHOs [environmental health officers] and if they aren’t, it’s a missed opportunity”. He said: “There is significant capacity that is sitting there for this kind of work to be done.”

I still don't understand why GPs weren't more involved since presumably whether someone has been inoculated should appear on their medical records, so why not use them (properly resourced) from the beginning rather than bringing in credit reference agencies? Particularly if as we've seen some people aren't known by the agencies. If someone's not on a GP list somewhere then that in itself is useful information that needs some form of action.

 

[teuchter]

Sorry for taking a while to reply to you, I've been busy with kids, work, kids, housework and kids. And I apilogise for not finding the time to read and digest the 81 page NAO report you linked to.

What you seem to be getting at is that it was the centralised nature of Baroness Harding's contract tracing system rather than the outsourcing. Let's have a glimpse of what that outsourcing looked like:

Serco Have Subcontracted Contact Tracing Jobs To The Company Embroiled In The Tax Credits Scandal And Debt Collection Companies

So NHST&T gave £108 million to Serco, who took their cut and then subcontracted the work to various organisations, not all of whom have been revealed, but included debt collection agencies and Concentrix, the US firm that was sacked by the government over the tax credit scandal that saw almost 90 per cent of appealing claimants win their case.

No surprise it wasn't a success.

But where would those 18,000 contract tracers have come from?

NAO finds Test and Trace outsourcing saw ‘substantial resources spent on staff providing minimal services’

The NAO said that by mid-June, the so-called “utilisation rate” for those staff – reflecting the proportion of time they worked during their paid hours – was just 1%, effectively meaning they had little work to do.

Seems they didn't need 18,000 contact tracers. And as you note, from August they've been reducing numbers and relying more on local authorities to do the work. Why did it take until August? Did it take that long to notice, even though the approach was criticised from day one, or because:

The watchdog said DHSC had “no flexibility to reduce the number of call handlers under the original contracts” and had to wait until they had run their three-month initial course before it could negotiate new terms

Seems it was because they were bound by the contract they'd entered into.

While the desire for a centralised approach may have been part of the problem, I think that outsourcing was a problem too.

I'll put my cards on the table: I'm not a fan of outsourcing. It's a way for private business to extract profit from areas where there's no traditional profits to be made while governments can save money by reducing workers' pay and conditions by making it not their problem. It's an ideological position sold as efficiency.

Yup it looks like someone made a mis-judgement when deciding how many contract tracers would be necessary. That decision about the scale of the operation must have been taken at high level - above the level of the out-sourcing surely.

But what would be the alternative scenario, where the extra contact tracing wasn't "out-sourced" but somehow taken on by local authorities or other already existing public bodies? 18,000 or even 10,000 seems like a lot - would local authorities somehow have been able to take on these numbers of extra staff, and then been able to get rid of them more quickly? How would that have worked?

I don't disagree that there may an ideological position behind certain types of 'outsourcing'. Where there's something that has normally been done in-house, and this is changed so that it is done by an external provider in an attempt to achieve greater efficiency then I'd largely agree with you. Although I could also say that an in-principle opposition to outsourcing is an ideological position too. There might be certain things, for certain types of organisations, that are best carried out in house and other things that aren't.

My main issue with the "out-sourcing" being talked about in context of pandemic-related stuff is that what people are calling outsourcing is vague and selective. As far as the contact tracing is concerned, it doesn't seem as straightforward as the type of situation I describe above. It's not a simple case of existing expertise and function being replaced by something external - it was a case of adding capacity (at a fairly massive scale as far as I can see). It does look like there was a failure at the beginning to fully utilise existing expertise and/or integrate it with the newly added capacity but that doesn't have to be a necessary consequence of adding external providers. That's a failure of those with strategic control of the project.

Why is it that we are not seeing the same kinds stories about 'outsourcing' as far as the vaccine rollout is concerned? There are all sorts of private companies involved in that. Why don't we see stories about vaccine devlopment and production "outsourced" to pharmaceutical companies (and lots of money was thrown at them)? What about all the privately owned and operated pharmacies that are part of the operation?

 

[teuchter]

This (and more) is also relevant from Sue 's link. There was capacity there in councils that wasn't called on, although it doesn't say whether they were twiddling their thumbs.



I still don't understand why GPs weren't more involved since presumably whether someone has been inoculated should appear on their medical records, so why not use them (properly resourced) from the beginning rather than bringing in credit reference agencies? Particularly if as we've seen some people aren't known by the agencies. If someone's not on a GP list somewhere then that in itself is useful information that needs some form of action.

That story looks like it is talking about 5000 LA-employed contact tracers who might have been drawn upon by PHE, another public body, but weren't. Unless I've misunderstood, I don't see what this has got to do with the question about private operators supplying staff to the national system.

And the question about whether those 5000 were twiddling their thumbs is not an insignificant one. Were they able simply to drop all of their existing workload? Seems unlikely to me.

 

[two sheds]

That story looks like it is talking about 5000 LA-employed contact tracers who might have been drawn upon by PHE, another public body, but weren't. Unless I've misunderstood, I don't see what this has got to do with the question about private operators supplying staff to the national system.

And the question about whether those 5000 were twiddling their thumbs is not an insignificant one. Were they able simply to drop all of their existing workload? Seems unlikely to me.

Well if you have that expertise in house, then they could do the training of the extra people taken on. Properly do the training, not the perfunctory stuff I saw from the reports from trainees taken on. And no if the government had taken on more people trained by these contract tracers then thumb twiddling wouldn't have come into it. Obviously.

You've not answered (among other things) where all these private sector trainees came from and whether they were twiddling toes and thumbs. Were they able simply to drop all of their existing workload? Seems unlikely to me.

 

[teuchter]

Well if you have that expertise in house, then they could do the training of the extra people taken on. Properly do the training, not the perfunctory stuff I saw from the reports from trainees taken on. And no if the government had taken on more people trained by these contract tracers then thumb twiddling wouldn't have come into it. Obviously.

Right, so we come back to what the reality of the numbers is. If a council department environmental health department has say 5 employees and they suddenly need to train up 18 or 10 new people whilst also trying to cope with what was presumably an unprecedented sudden increase in workload, is that something that's going to be easy for them to do? Are they circumstances in which you can be confident that training will not be 'perfunctory'?

If there are several hundred LAs across the country, does it make sense for them each individually to be carrying out training? Or maybe could you see the logic of the thinking that if you suddenly need to train up 18,000 people for a new task, it might make sense to devise a training routine that you can roll out to them all in one go? I don't know - but it doesn't appear obvious to me that throwing a huge number of new staff at existing departments and leaving it to them to work out how to sort things out, is the best approach.

You've not answered (among other things) where all these private sector trainees came from and whether they were twiddling toes and thumbs. Were they able simply to drop all of their existing workload? Seems unlikely to me.

I would guess that they were people looking for jobs (ie. unemployed at that point) who saw a three month contract advertised and took it.

Unlike the 5000 council employees who already had positions and existing workload.

 

[Pickman's model]

Right, so we come back to what the reality of the numbers is. If a council department environmental health department has say 5 employees and they suddenly need to train up 18 or 10 new people whilst also trying to cope with what was presumably an unprecedented sudden increase in workload, is that something that's going to be easy for them to do? Are they circumstances in which you can be confident that training will not be 'perfunctory'?

every few years councils up and down the country have to staff election counts. these are massive undertakings for which electoral services departments have no staff. so what councils do is to advertise internally for people to staff voting stations and the count. similarly council staff working from home could be brought in to support test and trace efforts, moving people from work which is less important in the current situation to work which is more important. people working within these bodies would already know much about the workings of the local authority, have access to the relevant systems, and wouldn't need to be trained up from scratch or give notice to their current employers. working (albeit virtually) alongside experienced colleagues would multiply the abilities of the public health department while ensuring on the job training and maintenance of standards.

 

[two sheds]

No, on reflection teuchter you're quite right. Why wouldn't you take responsibility away from people with actual medical test & trace experience you could give it to tax avoiding companies with histories of ballsing up contracts like Serco?

Serco a high-risk client with history of failures, offshore law firm found

Appleby, at centre of Paradise Papers leak, ran risk assessment before agreeing to help firm set up holding company in Mauritius

www.theguardian.com

“It has a history of problems, failures, fatal errors and overcharging,” a senior Appleby compliance officer wrote.

At the time, the company was under investigation by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office for billing the government for the electronic monitoring of criminals who were either still behind bars or dead. It paid back £68.5m to the government over the scandal, but was later cleared of fraud.

Serco, it was noted, was part of a consortium the UK’s Office for Nuclear Regulation had accused of breaching its responsibilities for the handling of radioactive waste. It had also presented false data to the NHS 252 times, was accused of fraudulent record keeping and had allegedly manipulated results when it failed to meet targets, the compliance team warned.

“The company is alleged to have covered up the sexual abuse of immigrants in Yarl’s Wood removal centre,” the compliance officer wrote.

If they'd done a good job of the test&trace then I might agree with you. It's been a fiasco though. As lots of people predicted.

 

[platinumsage]

every few years councils up and down the country have to staff election counts. these are massive undertakings for which electoral services departments have no staff. so what councils do is to advertise internally for people to staff voting stations and the count. similarly council staff working from home could be brought in to support test and trace efforts, moving people from work which is less important in the current situation to work which is more important. people working within these bodies would already know much about the workings of the local authority, have access to the relevant systems, and wouldn't need to be trained up from scratch or give notice to their current employers. working (albeit virtually) alongside experienced colleagues would multiply the abilities of the public health department while ensuring on the job training and maintenance of standards.

I find it hard to believe that after a decade of cuts, councils would have legions of workers doing tasks that could be suddenly dumped in favour of t&t.

Track and trace will be running for over a year so can't really be compared to an election night.

 

[Pickman's model]

I find it hard to believe that after a decade of cuts, councils would have legions of workers doing tasks that could be suddenly dumped in favour of t&t.

Track and trace will be running for over a year so can't really be compared to an election night.

i don't give a fuck what you find difficult to believe. the simple fact is there will be workers currently wfh who can be turned from their current roles to working on t&t. for example, in hackney there are several library sites which are closed and i am sure the staff from those libraries will not be transferred to other open sites. why not put them on t&t?

 

[teuchter]

No, on reflection teuchter you're quite right. Why wouldn't you take responsibility away from people with actual medical test & trace experience you could give it to tax avoiding companies with histories of ballsing up contracts like Serco?

If they'd done a good job of the test&trace then I might agree with you. It's been a fiasco though. As lots of people predicted.

There have been parts of it that have not worked and there have been parts of it that have worked ok. Unfortunately we have no 'control group' where all of the responsibility was taken on by LA's and we could see what the outcome would have been.

I don't know about your local council but mine here is fairly good at balls-ups and fiascos.

Carpet-bombing the thread with guardian articles about Serco failures doesn't really get us anywhere does it? I'm perfectly aware that private companies are capable of making a mess of things. Would it not be more interesting to try and understand where things actually went wrong, instead of reducing it to a simplistic public body good private body bad argument?

Even the numbers thrown around about the relative % success of the national scheme testers and the locally based ones are simplistic and ignore the fact that they are doing different jobs.

 

[platinumsage]

i don't give a fuck what you find difficult to believe. the simple fact is there will be workers currently wfh who can be turned from their current roles to working on t&t. for example, in hackney there are several library sites which are closed and i am sure the staff from those libraries will not be transferred to other open sites. why not put them on t&t?

I don’t give a fuck about your anecdote of a handful of library workers either, as that doesn’t change my point. Most councils have fuck all library workers left anyway, and the vast majority that do have had to redeploy them to other essential services.

 

[two sheds]

There have been parts of it that have not worked and there have been parts of it that have worked ok. Unfortunately we have no 'control group' where all of the responsibility was taken on by LA's and we could see what the outcome would have been.

Well quite. Have a think why that might be.

Carpet-bombing the thread with guardian articles about Serco failures doesn't really get us anywhere does it? I'm perfectly aware that private companies are capable of making a mess of things. Would it not be more interesting to try and understand where things actually went wrong, instead of reducing it to a simplistic public body good private body bad argument?

An article on Serco failures is hardly carpet bombing, somewhat relevant because they're handling much of the test & trace. And I and others have detailed where we think it's gone wrong. Most of which you've ignored.

 

[teuchter]

i don't give a fuck what you find difficult to believe. the simple fact is there will be workers currently wfh who can be turned from their current roles to working on t&t. for example, in hackney there are several library sites which are closed and i am sure the staff from those libraries will not be transferred to other open sites. why not put them on t&t?

What happens when the libraries and all sorts of other council services start to reopen and we're at the stage where T&T actually becomes most critical?

 

[platinumsage]

Here are some examples. Councils have been struggling to maintain their statutory care responsibilities. The idea that they could staff T&T is a nonsense:

Northants library staff redeployed to help vulnerable residents

Library staff across Northamptonshire have been redeployed to help vulnerable residents who are self-isolating during the Covid-19 pandemic.

www.northamptonshire.gov.uk

Around 70 staff from the library service team will be supporting the Community Resilience hub from today, calling vulnerable people from local library phones to check that they are safe and well, and if they need any support.

200 council staff redeployed to support the Covid-19 response – Herefordshire Council

200 council staff redeployed to support the Covid-19 response Staff help with delivering emergency supplies and supporting the most vulnerable residents

www.herefordshire.gov.uk

One such redeployed team is the Library Delivery Service. They are used to delivering books to the housebound in the community; now they are using their logistic and organisational skills for a different purpose – to pick-up and distribute medicines to people who may not have friends, families or neighbours to support them.

Hertfordshire County Council staff redeployed to fight Covid-19 in frontline roles

We have redeployed 849 of our staff to work in critical services to help fight Covid-19.

www.hertfordshire.gov.uk

Other county council staff, including those who usually work in services that have been suspended since the lockdown was introduced, such as Libraries, Adult Care Day Services and Registration Services, are being asked to offer extra hours if they work part time and to move to different roles in a bid to support the frontline response to the Covid-19 pandemic through our new Redeployment Hub, which aims to create a community workforce. These individuals will be moved to more urgent duties within administration functions, adult social care or community support roles.

 

[two sheds]

Would not some extra funding help all this? Rather than the hundreds of millions that seem to have been thrown at Serco and co. with little financial oversight. Councils have been squeezed for years - release some of that money to them.