Oral Answers to Questions

Karl Turner Excerpts

Tuesday 6th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)]

What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the NHS Test and Trace service.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the NHS Test and Trace service.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the NHS Test and Trace service.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Whately]

I thank the hon. Member for her question. I am sure she will know that local authorities received £400 million to support them with local outbreak management. It is really important to have this coming together of the national system and the local system, where local authorities are indeed playing an important part, using their local knowledge to follow up with contact tracing, particularly for some of the contacts that are proving harder to reach.

[Karl Turner [V]]

Schools in my constituency are having to close, disrupting children’s education and the work of their parents. Serco’s test and trace has been an unmitigated disaster. It is more than an extraordinary waste of public money; it is a public health crisis. To make matters worse, Ministers signed off on a wholly inappropriate Excel spreadsheet, blowing billions and leaving thousands of contacts untraced. When I asked the Secretary of State last week when he was going to take personal responsibility, he simply boasted that the system was working brilliantly. When does the Minister think her boss, the Secretary of State, will begin to take personal responsibility for this fiasco?

[Helen Whately]

There was quite a lot in that question. One thing I will say on schools is that enabling our children to continue to go to school is very much part of the whole strategy that we are using to tackle and suppress coronavirus, because education is so important. On the specific test and trace system to which the hon. Member refers, the Secretary of State spent an hour and a half in the Chamber yesterday answering colleagues’ questions about the performance of that system.