Tory peer reveals NHS contact-tracing app has cost £11.8m to date
The NHS contact-tracing app has so far cost £11.8million, it has been revealed in the House of Lords.
During a sitting on June 22, Lord Bethell, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for innovation, was asked how much the app had cost the taxpayer.
“The cost to date has been £11.8million,” he told the House of Lords.
This follows the government announcing on 18 June that it was abandoning its model for the NHS contact-tracing app and would switch to Google and Apple’s technology.
The U-turn follows months of debate over whether a centralised or decentralised approach to contact-tracing should be used.
The NHS opted for a centalised approach, which would see data collected from the app sent to a central database for analysis.
Apple and Google’s decentralised contact-tracing model has been labelled as being more secure, but means epidemiologists have access to less data.
The government had been running field tests on both versions of the technology, alongside the NHS contact-tracing app trial in the Isle of Wight, to determine which approach was better.
The tests revealed issues with both technologies and it is believed the government will be working with Google and Apple to develop a companion app that supports the “end-to-end” NHS test and trace service.
Lord Bethell was pushed further on the government’s decision to abandon its app.
“The decision to change strategy was ultimately taken on operational grounds,” he told the House of Lords.
“There have been technical issues, both with the Apple app and with the NHS app. Of that we cannot avoid those facts. We are still some way from resolving those technical issues, but in partnership with Apple, we hope to overcome them and when we do, there will be an update to the house.”
A date for the roll-out of this new style of app is not yet known.
11 Comments
the seven companies Rob listed above ^^ with awarded contracts; barely accounts for £10m..
Anyone got any idea where the other £10,990,000000 has gone??
That is a shit load of our money to spaff up the wall
Ah I’d better get to spec savers!
Why do we continue to waste tax payers money on systems that never work. Perhaps the government should be able to recover cost on failure. Employed by the NHS, can’t help wonder why everything is required by yesterday. The whole COVID-19 crisis being mis-manged from the start leaves little faith. How long will it take us to pay back the amount of money borrowed in the shrinking economy. Perhaps the government could have acted sooner given the outbreak did not start here saving money not wasting it.
This is HIGHLY suspicious spending and gross misconduct of Tax payer funds.
For them to spend THAT much money is ludicrous but to spend that much BEFORE finding out it’s flawed stinks of corruption.
I notice Zuhlke have not listed the app under their client success stories yet 😉
Data from UK Gov Contracts Finder Service – http://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk
Contracts found by searching for “NHSX” AND “Contact Tracing” OR “Covid-19 App”
NCC did security testing as did HeleCloud
Cloudflare is used for DDOS protection
GoPivotal (VMWare) – App Development and Support
Zuhlke provide Build Assurance and Live Phase support services
Has anyone any idea how you can spend even a tiny fraction of this building an App? I can appreciate that the server side will take more resources than the App itself, but after 20+ years in healthcare computing even I am flabbergasted this time around.
Would be quite interesting to know what Zuhlke and VMWARE have actually done and why 7 different companies are involved. It “smellslike” poor project management and that the project has been rushed into without appropriate investigation and analysis of the Android and Apple platforms to be confident in the approach
.
These are the contracts I have identified:
– Go Pivotal (UK) Limited – £1,822,210
– Zuhlke Engineering Ltd – £6,774,432
– NCC Services Limited – £132,375
– Nine23 Ltd – £51,600.00
– VMWARE UK LIMITED – £3,025,739
– Cloudflare Inc – £78,504
– HeleCloud Limited – £162,768.00
Who owns these companies?
Companies House is a fine resource for sleuthing.
For example, did you know that Zuhlke had a turnover of ~£6m, in the financial year to Dec 2019. The contracts won from NHSDigital/X/England for this app in Q2 of this year exceed that!
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