Thread by @rcolvile

In my column today, I try to get to grips with one of the big puzzles of the pandemic - how can the same state that is doing the vaccine rollout so well have done testing & tracing so badly? (1/?) thetimes.co.uk/article/the-va…

If you listen to the Left, it’s simple. The Tories bunged £37 billion to Serco and their private-sector mates, who screwed everything up. Here’s Jezza, for example

https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1368986542031650817?s=20

Leaving aside the fact that ‘Track and Trace’ is what the Royal Mail do to parcels (I made that mistake SO often while writing), the whole £37bn figure is a great example of Twyman’s Law - which holds that the more interesting a figure is, the more likely it is to be wrong.

Thinking about Twyman’s Law would have told Handelsblatt that a vaccine that worked for working-age adults was unlikely to collapse to 8% efficiency among OAPs. fullfact.org/health/german-…

In my favourite example, it would have saved the blushes of the Daily Star reporter who saw a headline about ‘five-inch guns’ and accused the Royal Navy of blowing £187m on a weapon the size of a toothbrush. thepoke.co.uk/2016/07/29/dai…

(£183m, sorry.) Anyway, it turns out that £37bn is the two-year budget for Test/Trace, of which only £5.7bn was spent by Nov. 85% is spent on testing rather than tracing, and only 1.5% goes to Serco, which is 1/5 firms working on testing centres and 1/2 on phone banks.

In other words, not 'Serco-led'. Not £37bn, or anything close to it. See Full Fact, among others fullfact.org/health/test-tr…

Now, as I say in the colmn, this is not to say Test and Trace has been a triumph. The NAO & PAC have both published reports making a range of major criticisms, not least the fact that £ on outsourcing/consultants was/is way too high and local knowledge was initially ignored.

One of the secrets of the vaccine rollout, as I also say, is that it didn’t make those mistakes - it was run from NHS England (rather than a new organisation), delegating responsibility to GPs and communities. (Someone had obviously been reading ‘Seeing Like A State’…)

But it also used consultants! The vaccine taskforce was led by Kate Bingham and relied on private sector expertise, consultants helped negotiate the contracts, work on logistics, help on vaccine hesitancy. And the things were made and largely designed by private companies.

In fact, I argue, the most significant difference between the programmes rests on the theory I spelt out in this thread - that pretty much everything about how the modern state works relies on databases.

https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1361673425140543490?s=20

Good databases = good/easy policy. Bad/no databases = disaster. When jabbing, we had solid patient lists. When tracing, we had to reconstruct social networks from scratch. (Plus people really like being told 'jab time' and really didn't like being told 'quarantine time'...)

In the column, I go into this far more, and try to spell out some of the implications. Please do have a read thetimes.co.uk/article/the-va…