Local Contact Tracing

Naz Shah Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)]

May I start by placing on the record my thanks to my local director of public health, Sarah Muckle, and her team for all their hard work during this pandemic? Labour has been calling on the Government to learn the lessons, help curb a rise in infections and save lives. The Government continue to use this phrase “NHS track and trace system”, which is more widely and truthfully known by the British public as, “Huge amounts of cash going to big private companies”—companies with links to the Tory party, and companies with truly abysmal track and trace records and poor results: in short, Serco and Sitel. The Government are doing this instead of funding local contact tracing and addressing the failures of a privatised and centralised contact tracing model.

Bradford, which contains my constituency, consistently seems to perform bottom on tracking and tracing the contacts of those who test positive for covid-19. The average percentage of contacts reached in Bradford over the last nine-week data period was 48.1%, but some weeks the figure has been lower than 40%. That is half the Government’s target. The rising infection rates are the direct result of a broken track and trace system, the Government’s inability to use straightforward communication and sheer incompetence on the part of this Government.

Here are some examples to illustrate how poor the Government’s communications have been. Two days ago, the Secretary of State told me that Bradford will be in the high tier of restrictions. Later that same day, in the press conference, the chief medical officer praised Bradford for our response to the situation. Then yesterday, we heard that the Government had started discussions to place Bradford in the highest tier of restrictions. Today, there is a pre-paid, pre-booked full-page Government advertisement in the Telegraph and Argus, Bradford’s local paper, saying that Bradford is in the medium tier of restrictions. So which one is it? Are we in the medium, high or higher tier?

Hold on—there’s more. On a Zoom call two days ago, I asked the Secretary of State what his Department was doing to address the issue of low numbers of people being tracked and traced in Bradford. Two days later, I still have no response, and yet the Secretary of State expects Members to be on a call with 20 minutes’ notice, and that is if they are lucky enough to get the email and not be on a train travelling down here.

The privatised track and trace programme is not working. My constituents deserve better. We need to get ahead of this virus. I will come to this Chamber time and again to highlight the Government’s incompetence and hold them to account for the sake of my constituents, because my constituents deserve better.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I spent an early part of my career in the sales industry, selling in the IT sector. I just wish that at some point I had come across a customer with as much money as this Government, and one so easily impressed and willing to give money to suppliers and then to defend them when they let them down. I never came across a customer nearly as naive as this Government.

Occasionally, a story seems to demonstrate a much wider point. So it was today with the scoop revealed by Ed Conway of Sky News that the Government are paying £7,360 per day to the management consultants at Boston Consulting Group, who are in charge of test and trace. That is the equivalent of a £1.5 million salary to preside over this shambolic system that is letting down all the people in my constituency and so many others. We will not find dedicated public servants being paid £7,500 a day or £1.5 million a year, but we will find a basic competence, a knowledge of their area and a desire to ensure that systems work before they are implemented. That is what we need right now in our system.

It is telling that, in a debate of this importance, with every Back-Bench Member of Parliament invited to contribute, just three Conservative MPs wanted to put their name on the list and say, “I will go in and speak up for the Government, because I think they are doing a good job.” That is because people in their constituencies know what is happening, and Conservative Members do not want it to be on their record that they were the ones speaking up for the Government, so they leave it to us to come here and expose the reality. That is what is happening. There are 365 Tory MPs—where are they? They are off in their offices hiding, while people in my constituency are being let down. [Interruption.] I accept that three have turned up, and I thank them for that, but I am talking about the rest of them.

We all remember when Leicester first went into lockdown and everyone said, “Oh my God! The rate in Leicester is appalling—those poor people.” The infection rate was less than 100 per 100,000 then.

[Naz Shah]

Does my hon. Friend share my worry that the proportion of people being reached by Test and Trace has decreased over the last three weeks and is now at a level similar to the one seen in the first week of the programme?

[Mr Perkins]

Yes, I do, and I had an experience of that recently.

Leicester had a rate of 100 per 100,000 when it went into lockdown. In Chesterfield, we have a rate of 143 per 100,000, and we are still in tier 1. The scale of how bad this must be before the Government are shocked is changing all the time.

I was recently in self-isolation because a friend told me that he had been diagnosed with coronavirus four days before Test and Trace got in touch with me. The date that Test and Trace had was nine days after I came out of self-isolation. The whole system is not working, and when you experience it yourself, you can see why this failure is happening.