The outsourcing giant Serco has won an additional £45m to provide COVID test centres, openDemocracy can reveal today. The multi-million pound deal has not been made public, but provides a major additional role for the controversial firm in the UK’s troubled Test and Trace scheme, which has come under fire as infection rates rise across the UK.
It has also emerged that another big Serco contract for COVID contact tracing, worth up to £432m, has a clause which allows Serco to effectively rewrite key terms on service provision – terms which have been redacted. The move has been criticised by procurement experts as “unethical” and “bad practice”, with the government’s overall approach to the contract labelled “astonishing”.
David Davis MP, the former Brexit Secretary, told openDemocracy, “Whilst it’s entirely understandable that the Department of Health have accelerated or maybe even short circuited some of the procurement processes in the circumstances, there is no excuse for secrecy either over the number and size of the contracts and most particularly over the level of service the contracts deliver.”
