Image: Number 10 [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via Flickr
MPs grill Dido Harding on timely data, centralised approach to testing, and NHS app U-turn
MPs have called on the NHS Test and Trace service to provide more timely data on its performance to better inform government decisions on ending national lockdown.
The programme’s head, Dido Harding (pictured), was told it was “essential” to provide up-to-date evidence, as decisions on ending the lockdown would “in great measure” depend on how well it was working.
“I hope that you will be able to provide—before these decisions are taken by the government—the basis on which we can assess the reduction in [the] R [rate] that you feel capable of giving to the system during the months ahead,” said Greg Clark, Conservative MP and chair of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, at its session on 3 February.
Harding claimed the service was hitting a target set by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies of at least 80 per cent of contacts self-isolating within 72 hours of exposure to the virus, adding that she was now looking at “how we can speed it up still further”.
But Clark said that a National Audit Office report in December showed the median time of contacts being traced and advised to self-isolate was 119 hours, and asked what evidence she had that the service had since improved.
Harding replied that the report was based on data from October and that “each of the component elements of NHS Test and Trace has substantially improved over the course of the last three months”.
“So,” she added, “our test turnaround times, the percentage of our contacts we reach and the time it takes to reach contacts have all substantially improved over the course of the past three months.”
But Harding was unable to provide up-to-date data, which she said was in the process of being validated and quality-assured, adding: “I’m very keen to have that full end-to-end data in the public domain.”
Centralised testing
Elsewhere in the session, Harding was grilled over the government’s early decision to adopt a centralised testing system with large lighthouse laboratories rather than relying on local health facilities.
Asked by Labour MP Graham Stringer if it was a mistake not to use the existing capacity of smaller private and public laboratories at the beginning of the pandemic, Harding insisted the only practical way to scale up testing was to build large-scale laboratories.
“If you look at the scaling of our testing programme across this country, it’s a huge success story,” she told MPs. “We do more tests per head of population than every other major western country. We have a very large-scale, high-performing system.
“If we had gone to begin with smaller units incrementally growing, we would have very quickly discovered it was impossible to reach the size of the testing network we needed to build through the summer and the autumn.”
Harding also defended the government’s decision to spend millions of pounds on a tracing app that would have used centralised data collection, which was later abandoned in favour of a decentralised approach provided by Apple and Google.
“I don’t think that the £14 million invested in the initial app was wasted,” she said. “It’s because of the work that we did with it that we were able to develop together with Google and Apple a much more effective algorithm, and Google and Apple have both recognised that.”