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14 Oct, 4 tweets, 2 min read
You might have noticed that NHS Test and Trace, the £12bn service supposed to tell us who has the virus and where, isn't yet world class in the way @BorisJohnson promised it would be. On 10 Sept @DavidDavisMP asked @MattHancock whether Serco and Sitel...
which provide call handling services for track and trace, would be subject to penalties if they fail to meet targets. His ministerial colleague @Helen_Whately has replied that "contract penalties...were not included in test and trace contracts with Serco or Sitel"...
Which many would see as shocking. And what Davis also regards as extraordinary, as I think would anyone with experience in business, is that she justifies the absence of any performance clauses of this sort on the basis that "contractual penalties are often unenforceable...
under English law". I have to say when I read this, my jaw dropped. I will be asking Davis about it on my programme, which you can watch here on Twitter at 9 and on ITV at 10.45. The full statement from Whately is here questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questi…

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More from @Peston

Robert Peston Profile picture
15 Oct
Tonight all attention is on the unusual alliance of right wing Tory MPs and Labour local officials, led by @AndyBurnhamGM, who for very different reasons want to keep Manchester out of Tier 3 restrictions (the Tories because they see the social cure as worse than the...
disease, Manc Labour because they want more compensation for damaged businesses and workers). But the economic impact of the imposition of Tier 2 restrictions on London, the biggest hospitality market in the UK by a...
country mile, will be significant. The prospects for pubs and restaurants are dire once again - and under the terms of the Job Support Scheme it is now much more expensive for them to keep staff on their books (they pay half wages for roughly a third of hours), and...
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Robert Peston Profile picture
12 Oct
If you wondered why ⁦@CMO_England⁩ told me the “baseline” measures in “very high” category of measures would not be sufficient to halt exponential growth of virus, attached is why - which is summary of paper from government advisers SAGE from 21 Sept, but just...
published saying pub closure not nearly enough to halt infections and hospitalisations to save lives. Restaurants, cafes, hairdressers and gyms would need to be closed too. All university teaching should go online. And there may need to be short national circuit-breaking lockdown
Whole SAGE paper is here assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
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Robert Peston Profile picture
5 Oct
Re Kate Bingham's interview with @FT, where she says that vaccinating the whole population is "not going to happen" and would be "misguided", she is deferring the holy grail of herd immunity for months beyond next spring, and saying we will be living with the virus for years...
Because as chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, she is saying that only the old, vulnerable and those working in healthcare settings will be vaccinated. In other words the vaccine would be protection for those most likely to become acutely ill or whose services are most needed...
But all the evidence shows that young people are the principle spreaders of the virus, which would still be in the community. And we would still need to maintain social distancing, since we could never be confident that a vaccine would deliver...
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Robert Peston Profile picture
3 Oct
Obviously this shows there was a gradual rise in Covid-19 infections in recent days rather than the levelling off we had been seeing. But here is the mystery. Test and Trace tell me there has NOT been a significant increase in the gap between individuals having...
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Broadly we now know that COVID-19 prevalence in the community was greater than the daily data was showing and the rate of growth was not flattening as seemed to be the case. But the biggest worry is that this is not a one-off correction, and there will be more upward...
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Robert Peston Profile picture
2 Oct
The announcement that @vonderleyen and @BorisJohnson will be speaking tomorrow afternoon "to take stock of negotiations" carries a weighty implication - namely that the EU wants to test whether the prime minister actually wants a free trade agreement and is prepared to...
negotiate in what EU leaders regard as "good faith". There is much suspicion, fuelled by the PM's decision to legislate to break the Withdrawal Agreement he signed, that the UK is talking only so as to find a way of blaming the EU for the absence of a deal, rather than...
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Robert Peston Profile picture
28 Sep
If @MattHancock gives a commitment from the Despatch Box to do roughly what Brady and the Tory rebels want - viz have advance votes in Commons on national measures to suppress #COVID19 except in acute emergency (and in those circumstances there would be a retrospective vote)...
- then the rebellion would largely melt away. “Yes we would accept that” said one influential Tory MP. “We can’t amend the Coronavirus Act, our amendment only has moral force, so yes a formal ministerial commitment would be enough” said another. So...
is that what Hancock and the government are planning to do on Wednesday? Such is what I would expect, since when I asked a senior government source whether the rebellion was causing anxiety he said he had absolutely no problem with MPs scrutinising and voting on...
Read 4 tweets

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