Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has claimed Britain’s Covid crisis would’ve been a ‘heck of a lot worse’ without the Government’s extortionate contact tracing scheme.
Mr Shapps attempted to defend the £22billion Test and Trace programme after a damning cross-party report found it had ‘no measurable effect’ on the epidemic.
The Commons Public Accounts Committee said there was no evidence the tracing scheme had made a dent in Covid transmission despite its ‘unimaginable’ budget.
Last year the Government spent £22bn on Test and Trace, and in his budget last week the Chancellor promised to throw another £15bn at it in 2021, bringing the total cost to £37bn. The report said the Government was treating British taxpayers ‘like an ATM machine’.
Mr Shapps described the report as ‘really quite strange’, insisting Test and Trace was ‘absolutely necessary’ and had ‘prevented the disease spreading further’.
He pointed out the programme had tracked down 9million potentially-infected Brits who may have otherwise spread the virus.
But MPs on the PAC said there was little proof people who were contacted through the programme were actually complying with the isolation rules.
Justifying the programme’s huge expenditure during a round of interviews this morning, Mr Shapps told Sky News: ‘It certainly hasn’t been cheap fighting coronavirus but it has absolutely been necessary.
‘This is a really quite strange report – 9.1million people have been contacted by Test and Trace. These are people who otherwise would be wandering around, often unaware that they had coronavirus, and spreading it around further.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has claimed Britain’s Covid crisis would have been a ‘heck of a lot worse’ without the Government’s expensive contact tracing scheme
Pictured: Graphs showing the number of coronavirus infections per day in the UK (top) and number of coronavirus-related deaths in the UK (bottom)
‘Whatever the coronavirus experience we’ve had…
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