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Revealed: ‘Failing’ Serco won another £57m COVID contract without competition

As Serco's share price soars, government accused of "shovelling huge sums of public money to a handful of outsourcing companies without competition, rigour or accountability".

By Caroline Molloy, Peter Geoghegan and Russell Scott
Revealed: ‘Failing’ Serco won another £57m COVID contract without competition
In the money.... | Kris Tripplaar/SIPA USA/PA Images
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Outsourcing giant Serco was given a £57 million contract to run COVID testing centres across the UK without any competition, openDemocracy can reveal.

The Department of Health and Social Care handed Serco and other private firms previously secret multi-million pound contracts to provide “management services” at sites across the country.

The news comes as the FTSE-listed firm announced this morning that the government has renewed an earlier contact-tracing contract – worth a reported £410 million – despite a swelling chorus of criticism of the scheme’s failings.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0