Private sector consultants are being paid £7,000 a day to help run the Government's failing Test and Trace programme, it emerged last night.The amount has been condemned as a 'disgraceful' use of taxpayer cash amid the already eye-watering expense of Covid testing.Budgeted at £12billion, the scheme is seen as vital to the Government's pandemic response, yet it is coming under severe strain as cases climb.Last week, a major glitch saw 16,000 cases go missing, severely hampering the contact tracing programme and officials' ability to track the spread of the virus. Even before that, the system was struggling to cope, with officials failing to trace a third of contacts who might have been exposed to Covid.Not only that, but half of those who are taking the tests in England are having to wait at least 48 hours for their results to come back, despite Boris Johnson's pledge to turn them around within a day by the start of July. Last night, it emerged that senior executives from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have been paid day rates of £7,360 – equivalent to an annual salary of £1.5 million – to advise on the running of the system.According to documents seen by Sky News, the Government paid BCG about £10 million for a team of 40 consultants to do four months' work between the end of April and late August.Labour MP Toby Perkins, raising the matter during a House of Commons debate on contact tracing yesterday, said: 'You won't find dedicated public servants being paid £7,500 per day, you won't find them on £1.5 million, but what you will find is a basic competence, a knowledge of their area, a desire to make sure that the systems work before they are implemented.'Referring to his previous career in the sales industry, Mr Perkins told MPs: 'I never came across a customer nearly as naive as what we have with the Government.'I just wish that at some point in my life I could have come across a customer with as much money as the Government has, as willing to be so easily impressed as this Government is, and as willing to give it to people and then defend the people who let them down as a supplier.' The vast Test and Trace programme was put together at rapid pace back in April and May, and is operated by a mish-mash of private companies, civil servants, health quangos and the NHS.The Department of Health relied on private sector consultants to help set up and run the programme.More than 1,000 consultants from Deloitte are said to be working on the programme, at day rates of as much as £2,360.The Government is reported to be recruiting even more consultants to work on its 'moonshot' programme of regular asymptomatic testing, with 165 new consultants drafted in to work on the programme until November. Share this article Share Labour health spokesman Jonathan Ashworth said last night: 'The figures being spent on this broken system are truly shocking.'Testing and contact tracing is failing to keep the virus under control, which makes it even more disgrace
