| This is not "corrupt but useful", it's "corrupt and useless". > I think this sort of thing has to be contextual. The context is that UK government gave £22 BILLION to private companies for Test and Trace, and they wasted most of it contributing to the very high death rate to covid in the UK. https://committees.parliament.uk/work/906/covid19-test-track... > At times, parts of the national tracing service have barely been used: in May, DHSC signed contracts for the provision of 3,000 health professionals and 18,000 call handlers. The call handler contracts were worth up to £720 million. By 17 June, the utilisation rate (the proportion of time that someone actively worked during their paid hours) was low for both health professional (4%) and call handler staff (1%), indicating that they had little work to do. This means substantial public resources have been spent on staff who provided minimal services in return. > National and local government have tried to increase public engagement with tracing, but surveys suggest that the proportion of contacts fully complying with requests to self-isolate might range from 10% to 59%. NHST&T acknowledges that non-compliance poses a key risk to its success and has taken steps to increase levels of self-isolation, for example by making follow-up calls to people while they are self-isolating. For as long as compliance is low, the cost-effectiveness of NHST&T’s activities will inevitably be in doubt. That's one example. There are dozens of other examples. > Companies awarded pandemic-related contracts include Randox, which received £479m for Covid testing. The firm pays Conservative MP Owen Paterson £100,000 a year as a consultant. > Meanwhile, Dominic Cummings’s father-in-law Sir Humphry Wakefield is an associate of the director of Admiral Public Relations, which received £670,000. > Health minister Edward Argar is a former senior executive at Serco, which is in charge of much of the contact-tracing system. The company’s chief executive is Rupert Soames, brother of ex-Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames. > Public First, whose directors previously worked for Mr Cummings and Michael Gove, was also paid £840,000 for “focus group research”. etc etc. |