It’s one of the biggest stories of Britain’s pandemic: lucrative public contracts going to outsourcing firms, allies of Dominic Cummings, and shady tech companies. We’ve been told the emergency means the usual processes have to be skipped – that there’s just no time for the niceties of procurement law or democratic debate when people are dying.
What that’s meant, in practice, is a new set of systems that are likely to stick around after the crisis ends. The government has claimed its coronavirus contracts are temporary, and will be rolled back at the end of the crisis. But it keeps handing out public money with no transparency and no debate.
One of the most important of these deals was between big tech firms and our NHS. The government quietly announced in a blog on 28 March that it had signed deals with US tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google – plus two controversial AI films, Faculty and Palantir – to create a giant COVID-19 datastore that represented potentially the largest transfers of patient data to private companies in the history of the NHS.
