News: 1615379404

To see imminent and epic failure Cumming from a mile away on this.

Maybe they should've gone for a drive to check their eyesight?

For a shit version of Pokemon Go

So about $30 billion US dollars..... about one and half times Apple's annual R&D costs.

They could have designed their own phone with that money, let alone a fooking app.

From the "demotivational" posters:

Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

I think that about sums it up!

As far as I'm aware, it's nothing to do with the NHS as such, was outsourced to everyone's favourite, Serco.

It’s all about branding...

You can't criticize "NHS" Digital cos that's attacking nurses and Cpt Tom and probably fluffy bunnies

"cos that's attacking nurses"

And that's the government's job, financially speaking.

It’s just absolutely astounding!

She really does have the reverse Midas touch!

Has she actually ever managed not to fuck up at great scale?

The excellent Private Eye did a piece after she was appointed detailing all the jobs she'd had and how long she'd stayed in them etc. It was a great read.

You missed the point

Her job is to funnel prodgious amounts of public money into private hands and whilst acting as a target for indignation

Let's not forget that her HUSBAND is the chair of the government anticorruption and cronyism committee

Well, she did start early: "commercial director for value added foods" at Tesco 2000 to 2004 where she had to be hurriedly promoted sideways to “international support director” (a non-existent position up until then). Even at that position she was apparently asked if she wouldn't mind finding an alternative position ... preferable away from Tesco.

> Since one of the UK's biggest ever corporate cyber-crimes happened on her watch as TalkTalk CEO, the Queen of Carnage Baroness Dido Harding was an obvious choice to head up the NHS Test and Trace system so vital to the nation's pandemic response when it was created in May 2020.

It's almost as if this isn't remotely relevant and is just more tedious Tory bashing from this once great website.

It's almost as if this isn't remotely relevant and is just more tedious Tory bashing from this once great website.

I think you'll find the media tend to bash the party in power because they're the one's f**king up. At the moment Labour are getting a free(ish) ride as they're not in power so can't do anything expect emit hot air.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that there's nothing personal in this. Of course there is. It's her personal record that leads to this, hence the recursive acronym: DIDO In Disaster Out.

This particular bunch of Tories appear to need a bashing. They are spending spectacular amounts of money on dysfunctional programs at a time when the economy is under unique pressure. I suspect the country wouldn't fair much better if the other lot were in power but it would likely be down to genuine ineptitude rather than the Old boys/girls club.

Tory bashing != Incompetence bashing

Granted they've often gone hand in hand over the past year, but this article is bashing her incompetence and obscene waste of money, not her political affiliation. Try to understand the difference here.

but the people spending 10 hours a day watching people suffocate to death while trying to avoid catching this fucking hideous disease deserve 1%.

Oh no, the unfair Tory bashing!

Fuck off.

FFS! There's no "tedious Tory bashing" going on here.

Dildo Harding is being (rightly) criticised for being a grossly incompetent fuckup who has a long history of fucking up everything she touches. That criticism is perfectly reasonable and more than justified. It's fair comment.

The fact she's probably a Tory is irrelevant. Though who knows for certain how Dildo votes or if she's a party menber?

Dildo is of course one of Boris's cronies. And married to a Tory MP. Which these days seem to be the essential requirements for receiving trainloads of cash from HM taxpayers.

It's beyond comprehension that Dildo was the best choice to run the Test and Trace programme. Apart from Flailing Failing Grayling, anyone could have done a far better job.

"It's beyond comprehension that Dildo was the best choice to run the Test and Trace programme."

Best choice? It's beyond comprehension that she was even considered a possible choice at all.

New here?

At least you lot got lucky with the vaccine programme: Kate Bingham, Tory crony wife that got the no-bid Vaccine Programme Contract just happened to be very competent and even have industry experience.

That could so easily have gone very differently!

I think it was the other way round. It was the scientists who knew her and tagged her for the job although I suppose her connections avoided her getting passed over.

The vaccination programme was Sir Patrick Vallance's project, and is run by the professionals in the NHS. Test and Trace is Dido Harding's creation and was outsourced to commercial companies with great experience of getting government contracts.

"wins the prize for the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time"

That depends on it's intended purpose. We don't know to what extent "Tory friends" have benefited.

yes we do - about £22bn.

DWP pays about £3.2bn to run its entire IT infrastructure to a combination of vendors, outsourcers and internals. That covers 900+ offices, 80,000+ staff, 18m claimants using 150+ different apps, and payments of £100bn+ in benefits a year.

DWP isn't a shining beacon of efficiency either, it's had some horrendous cockups and overspends on technology in the past (EDS and the CSA computer system, Universal Credit, PIP etc).

Even with all that in mind, T&T is a fraction of the size/staff and has spent DWP's entire IT budget nearly 7 times over.

"Even with all that in mind, T&T is a fraction of the size/staff and has spent DWP's entire IT budget nearly 7 times over."

To be fair to Test and Trace, their budget does include the cost of the test kits, and having them processed.

> To be fair to Test and Trace, their budget does include the cost of the test kits, and having them processed.

if you include that, then it's £34 billion spent

£22bn is just the part that's unaccounted for

It hardly bears saying... but what now? The PAC as far as I am aware have no real teeth or ability to change anything, so as usual it's back to the Tory BAU of the transference of wealth from the public to the private with no real world punitive measures to bring them back in line.

I'm appreciative that someone looks into this, but it all seems a bit futile if the only real outcome is a somewhat sarcastic tweet.

This is precisely the problem.

When you have people who suffer no consequences for squandering someone else's money, those people have absolutely no incentive to ensure that money is spent responsibly.

Governments around the world use the fact that you can't prosecute a politician for the consequences of their decisions while in office to re-distribute massive amounts of taxpayer money to their mates and cronies. This won't change until holding public office does not come with a get out of jail free card.

Well that's not going to happen until the functions of administration and law making are separated. I'd locate them at opposite ends of the land just to make sure.

has been calculated as a LOT more than £10k per nurse

Someone remind me about how much their pay rise was, again?

"wins the prize for the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time"

Not sure he has got it right. Quite possibly "so far", but "of all time" disregards how much better they will do next year now that it is clear what can be achieved if people really make an effort.

... is the proportion of test results delivered in under 24 hours from the swab being taken*. Dido Harding does not know, and, for some reason has not even bothered to find out. Test and Trace does not publish results from which this number can be determined. This is not merely incompetence, it is dereliction of duty.

My personal experience (and one should never generalise from a single example) is that none of my three tests returned a result in under 4 days. This is totally inadequate to reduce infection rates for a virus that exhibits such a high rate of infection. (I would be interested to hear from other Register readers of their experiences of Test and Trace.)

I would certainly be very interested to know the qualifications of the 'competitively priced' consultants on over £6k PER DAY, and why Baroness Harding thinks they are worth that level of fee.

*(It is as important to know that you are infected and have to isolate, as it is to know that you are not infected with Covid-19, and can get back to work, and your contacts do not have to isolate either and can keep the economy going.)

"I would be interested to hear from other Register readers of their experiences of Test and Trace."

I can only cite my daughter's experience. Returning from Spain she had the option of taking a test (back at the airport). After ringing several times for the delayed result she decided to drive back to the test centre and was half way there when they rung back.

I haven't read of the PAC getting into this aspect of T&T but maybe they should: schoolchildren failing a lateral flow test can have a PCR test to overrule it. A test taken at school has no such option. The essence of a a quick test known to return a proportion of false positives is that it's treated as a presumptive test whose positives you should follow up with a definitive test. It's almost as if T&T and/or DoE don't know what they're doing.

From today's Financial Times* (front page article - their website has a paywall):

"Yet less than 65 per cent of total laboratory testing capacity had been used in November and December. Even with this spare capacity, test and trace had never met the prime minister's commitment to turn around all tests in face-to-face settings in 24 hours - a goal he had said would be met by the end of June."

*(I only get it when there is an article I want to read, it is a bit too pricey for every day at £2.90, and the web site subscription is £35 per month!)

It's not incompetence at all, it's by design.

Au contraire, they were extremely competent at funneling the public money into the pockets of the "right" people, and they don't consider that to be a waste at all.

In the news today, the response from Harding and her acolytes is that the system is world leading in that the UK is testing more than any other nation. The complaint, that doesn't seem to have struck home is that even a world leading amount of testing hasn't noticeably had any affect on managing the pandemic.

A smart government wouldn't set the number of tests as the target, they would have set one related to reducing the infection rate. It was Deming who said (paraphrased) "Set people a target on which their jobs depend and they will do all they can to meet it - even it it requires destroying the company in the process." It's not party related as ISTR it was a Labour government that set NHS targets that bore little relationship to health outcomes (like patients had to be cleared from A&E within 4 hours - it didn't matter whether the patient survived in order to meet the target).

It's the seductive lure of numbers. They are the rocks on which the unwary will dash themselves to pieces. Reducing something to numbers is irresistible. The easier the better and best of all if the numbers turn up on a display without you having to have the skill to operate some device to get them. Numbers become and end in themselves. They're much easier to deal with than the messy business which is the reality they represent. Management by numbers, therefore, becomes management by the numbers which are easiest to collect.

£2bn - Amount NASA budgeted to send Perseverance rover to Mars, landing it on planet to collect samples and search for signs of alien life.

£22bn - Amount UK government budgeted to set up 'world-beating' test and trace system for coronavirus, which Dido Harding said last week was 'continuing to improve'.

Ah, yes. Continuous improvement.

The powers that be decided on TQM - mantra "Get it right first time every time." (They, the top team, spectacularly failed at that one ballsing up a projected relocation.)

Then they decided we had to move up a gear to ISO9000 - mantra "Continuous improvement.".

Nobody explained why, if we were getting it right first time every time there was scope for any improvement, let alone continuous improvement.

The test registration site is a ballsup. I was asked by my local hospital to do a home test. It arrived in an envelope that was massive and wouldn't fit through the letterbox so was dumped on the doorstep. The contents would have easily fit into a much smaller envelope that would have fitted.

I went through the online registration of my test kit and after getting to the end and going through the Google captcha looking for crosswalks I got a message saying "there was a problem, try again." Tried again only this time I was looking for fire hydrants and got the same message. Pretty sure I did both capchas correctly. I phoned the number given to register my test kit instead as the website didn't work. Waded through the menu system then got cut off. Phoned again and finally managed to speak to someone to register the kit.

I may be wrong, but from what I understand of that mysterious sixth person who went missing with the Brazilian strain of the virus also failed to register their test kit online. Probably the same issue that failed with mine, so their kit wasn't properly registered to anyone, resulting in that massive manhunt.

So much incompetence, so little time...

How long did you have to wait for the result?

Result came back a couple of days later (negative), so no issue with that part of it. I came very close to giving up in the first place though with the frustration trying to register the test kit.

I went through the online registration of my test kit and after getting to the end and going through the Google captcha looking for crosswalks I got a message saying "there was a problem, try again." Tried again only this time I was looking for fire hydrants and got the same message.

Now that you have brought the matter up can anyone tell me why anyone navigating a Captcha has to interpret photographs of (for example) USian street furniture despite not living there or (as in my case) not even having visited the place? And why are the blasted pictures (a) so small (e.g. the size of a postage stamp) and (b) an exercise in minimising the number of pixels involved?

Where is the grumply old git icon when you most need one?

Fully agree. The other issue is why do they "need" to have a captcha at the end of the registration process anyway? The likely result is that some people fail to register their test kits and test and trace are left with kits they are unable to connect to anyone, rendering them worse than useless.

So, the Track, Isolate, Test for Suspected Unprecedented Pathogen (TITSUP) system went Tits up, what's the problem? Did exactly what the Government described in the document.

And £22 Billion went into the pension pots of a few of the People in charge's mates, again, what they wanted.

It wasn't about saving lives, or even protecting them, if it were, they would have done things that actually worked. (theoretically)