QUOTE FROM OPEN DEMOCRACY:
Dear Rhisiart,
It’s happened again! We’ve just revealed that the controversial Tory-linked firm Serco has landed another £45 million to deliver the UK’s ‘failing’ COVID response , without any competition.
This latest deal is to provide… well, we’re not entirely sure. Serco says it’s for COVID test centres, but the government is (once again) breaking its own rules and refusing to publish details .
With up to 750,000 requests for COVID tests a day unanswered, the Test and Trace system is in crisis. Serco has banned staff from talking to the media , but insiders have told openDemocracy of a lack of training in call centres and poor treatment of staff.
Astonishingly, a clause in Serco’s contact tracing deal allows them to rewrite key terms, simply requiring Serco to act “in good faith”. This is a company that was fined more than £100 million in the last decade for fraud, false accounting and service failures .
As COVID rates across the country surge, why is Boris Johnson’s government writing large, unaccountable firms more blank cheques?
It’s the biggest scandal of our time. As thousands have died, lost jobs and loved ones, we’ve uncovered how Tory donors, allies and a handful of big firms have been quietly getting rich .
Johnson’s health minister is a former Serco lobbyist , and Serco’s CEO is the brother of a former Tory MP. But it doesn’t stop there.
Our journalism has exposed lucrative PR contracts for friends of Dominic Cummings . Dodgy NHS data deals for a firm with ties to Boris Johnson’s Vote Leave campaign . And a gold rush for property developers who gave £11 million to the Tories in less than a year .
We were the first to break the story of Deloitte’s lucrative ‘Operation Moonshot’ contract – with insiders admitting to us the plan was “crazy”.
And earlier this week we revealed how Boris Johnson had a ‘personal’ meeting with Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev – days after locking down the country and telling everyone to avoid all “non-essential contact”.
(Johnson later made Lebedev a peer, alongside his brother and several Tory donors and allies.)
UNQUOTE