Free lateral flow tests are now to be scrapped in the UK under plans designed to edge Britain closer to ‘living with Covid’. The plans to axe ‘unsustainable’ lateral flow tests will be announced within weeks by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, according to The Times. It comes as the National Audit Office revealed that the UK spent a colossal £370 billion of public money on Covid measures including lateral flow testing, wasted PPE equipment and the NHS’s expensive Test and Trace system.
The astounding figure is the equivalent of about £4, 700 to £6,100 per person in the UK, with the House of Commons admitting in December that that cost of Covid could be as high as £410 billion.
Official figures show that the Government’s ‘extremely high’ spending in 2020/21 was about £167 billion higher than had been planned before the pandemic for that year, driving the budget deficit to levels not seen during British peacetime.
The new system could mean that free tests are only offered in high-risk settings including care homes and schools, and to people who display symptoms. Contact tracing by NHS Test and Trace is also likely to be scaled back, according to The Times.
A senior Whitehall source told the UK paper in this report: “I don’t think we are in a world where we can continue to hand out free lateral flow tests to everybody for evermore. It’s likely we will move to a scenario where there is less testing but where we have a capacity to ramp it up if necessary, such as in the winter.”
At least £6 billion of public money has been spent solely on mass testing using rapid antigen tests. Yet, antigen testing accounts for just one component of the UK’s spending on Covid measures.
So how exactly did Britain spend an incredible £370 billion on Covid?
Most of this extra money was spent on public services (such as the NHS), support for businesses, and support for individuals, according to the UK Parliament. Some of the largest schemes include the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS, often referred to as the furlough scheme) and NHS Test and Trace.
The departments responsible for the most extra spending were HMRC, the Department for Health and Social Care, and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the House of Commons December report into public spending states.
Where does the £370 billion come from?
All public spending is eventually paid for by the taxpayer and other government income, but the amounts raised by these tumbled during the pandemic.
The Government accounted for this shortfall by increasing borrowing to £323 billion in 2020/21. The amount borrowed in 2020/21 was, in fact, a ‘peacetime record’. The Parliament report argues that the cost of borrowing is currently at a historic low, and so that whilst this doesn’t pose an ‘immediate problem’, it does leave the UK’s public finances vulnerable to increases in these costs.
£370 billion later, while most spending directly related to the Covid-19 pandemic is currently forecast to end after 2021/22, the long-term effects of the pandemic are likely to place huge pressure on public spending for some time to come.
£134 BILLION – AND 6.4 BILLION HOURS – SPENT ON LOCKDOWN FURLOUGH SCHEME
Breaking down the extensive cost of Covid, UK workers spent a total of approximately 6.4 billion hours (equivalent to 700,000 years) on furlough, the Job Retention Scheme (JRS) in 2020 according to analysis from the New Economics Foundation. £134 billion was spent on working from home in 2020, along with an estimated £3.3 billion more in 2021.
Sources cited in the House of Commons report into spending in the age of Covid agree that most extra spending has been on public services, support for businesses and support for individuals. However, they disagree on which of these is the highest. The NAO estimates that support to businesses has been the largest, at £154 billion, while the OBR puts the total for this category much lower (at £71 billion). For the OBR, spending on public services has been the largest.
The cost of furlough schemes raises broader questions about whether or not lockdown was worth it. Many believe locking down and forcing people to work from home has been detrimental. Campaigners claim that substance abuse got worse amid remote work, while domestic abuse has soared during Covid, becoming a ‘crisis within a crisis’ and believed to be fuelled in part by an increase in people being at home.
‘WASTEFUL, EXPENSIVE AND INEFFICIENT’ TRACK AND TRACE: £37 BILLION
Accounting for further spending, a total of £37 billion was allocated to the NHS Test and Trace system over two years, with its budget due to be reviewed in April.
The system, which was given an incredible level of financial backing, was widely criticised for being ‘wasteful’ and ‘beyond useless’. Those who challenged the system argued that the use of unqualified call handlers didn’t make sense, and that some of England’s 28,000 retired GPs should have been used to contact Covid patients instead of those without sufficient clinical training.
The blame for the downfalls inherent in the system was firmly laid at the feet of those at the top making political decisions without regard for, or experience in, public health. Some of those involved in running the scheme – such as Dr David Maisey – spoke out.
Dr Maisey’s letter published in The Guardian read: “I agree the system is inefficient and wasteful. We struggle with poor technology, poor training, poor communication from above – we are also told not to contact PHE directly – and almost complete absence of clear management structure.”
£6 BILLION ON LATERAL FLOWS
Another chunk of public spending by the UK Government is made up of the (at least) £6 billion which has so far been agreed in contracts for lateral flow tests – although this is likely an underestimate.
The biggest provider of the tests, Innova Medical – a company formed at the start of the pandemic – secured more than £2 billion for selling Chinese-manufactured lateral flow devices to the UK government, clearly ready to meet Boris Johnson’s desperation for tests that he claimed would allow the UK to return to normality. Two years on, the start-up has sold more than 1 billion tests worldwide, and have become one of the few ‘winners’ of the Covid crisis.
Despite its huge financial gains from Covid, Innova has come in for some criticism. In June, the US Food and Drug Administration’s recall of Innova tests in the US undoubtedly undermined the case for Covid-19 testing. The FDA said it had “significant concerns” that Innova’s test could produce false results leading to ‘serious illness or death’, urging Americans who had received Innova’s products to “destroy the tests by placing them in the trash”. Despite this, Innova continues to offer products in the UK and other foreign markets.
Other winners of the Government’s costly reliance on lateral flow testing includes a UK firm which was able to transform its fortunes, going from debt to £20.5 million thanks to lucrative Covid test deals.
Disruptive Nanotechnology describes itself as the exclusive UK and EU distributor for tests made by Innova and was started by two entrepreneurs, Charles Palmer and Kim Thonger. Despite being co-owners of the company and raking in millions, they have no apparent background in healthcare, The Guardian claims.
£2 BILLION SQUANDERED ON UNUSABLE PPS
The UK Government squandered billions in taxpayers’ money on unusable personal protective equipment (PPE). An inquiry carried out by the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in July uncovered that the Government had wasted a staggering £2.1 billion on PPE that was useless, with the amount spent on the equipment that was unfit for the NHS coming in at five times higher than official estimates from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in January 2021. Last May, out of the 32 billion items of PPE ordered by the DHSC, 11 billion had been distributed, but 12.6 billion pieces remained on standby at an additional cost of roughly £6.7 million a week in storage, the PAC said.
The chief of the National Audit Office in the UK, Gareth Davies, blasted Government ministers, who he said ‘did not consistently meet essential standards around how taxpayers’ money was spent’. Mr Davies told The Telegraph in April that questions remained over “how some suppliers were picked” and priority given to certain companies by the Government.
Market intelligence company Tussell estimates that contracts for £14.6 billion have been awarded for PPE since the start of the Covid crisis.
COVID VACCINES: £12 BILLION
While the UK does not disclose what it pays for vaccines, citing commercial confidentiality, a UK spending watchdog said in December 2020 that the UK’s spending on Covid vaccines had hit nearly £12 billion. The National Audit Office said that this cost does not cover future multi-year programmes for jabs. The UK Government, on the one year anniversary of the development of the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine, said it had spent £88 million in funding to develop and manufacture the AstraZeneca jab.
Last month, Rishi Sunak sounded the alarm on vaccine spending. The chancellor warned of spending cuts or tax rises to pay for the UK’s booster programme as he warned the Department of Health of the financial burden of the multi-billion pound costs of regular booster rollouts. Despite immense spending on the UK’s vaccine programme, which was once heralded as the way out of Covid, vaccines have not been as effective as once hoped.