Covid-19: Test Results

Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I acknowledge the presence of fraud and condemn all those involved, but I do not see the connection between fraud and inefficiency.

[Lord Field of Birkenhead (CB)]

My Lords, I ask the Minister to convey our thanks to those rank and file workers who are trying to make this system work. I also say that, until he modifies the scheme so that we have local tracing, there will be many more sessions of Question Time that will be embarrassing for him.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord—I am never embarrassed—for giving me the opportunity to say a massive thanks to those tens of thousands involved. They take a huge amount of heat from the criticism targeted at test and trace, but many of them are working through the night to hit our targets, because people often take their tests during the morning or the afternoon. A lot of them work at the weekend and during holidays, when people often want their test results. It is arduous, tough, technical work and we are enormously grateful to those concerned. On local testing, we have in place 100 local test partnerships between local authorities and the national test and trace system which are proving extremely valuable, particularly in targeting hard-to-reach communities. We are putting an enormous amount of resources into them and they are proving extremely successful.