10 2GM Friday August 7 2020 | the timesNews
The mayors of Manchester and Bir-
mingham have called for jury service-
style payments to people asked to iso-
late by the test and trace system.
As figures showed a “gentle rise” in
confirmed cases, Andy Burnham,
mayor of Greater Manchester, said that
poorer people who could not afford to
go two weeks without pay were avoid-
ing the contact tracing system.
People will not return to city centres
until contact tracing improves and the
government must financially compen-
sate those doing their public duty, Mr
Burnham told Times Radio.
Andy Street, mayor of the West Mid-
lands, said that higher payments were
“eminently sensible” and that contact
tracing rates were “not high enough”.
However, Boris Johnson again insist-
ed that NHS Test and Trace was “world
beating”, saying that Britain was testing
more per head than the rest of Europe.
“If you look at what we are doing with
some of the local social distancing
measures that we are bringing back in,
that’s entirely driven by our ability toPay people to isolate, mayors demand
Chris Smyth Whitehall Editor detect cases through local test and
trace,” he said.
Figures published yesterday showed
that the system is still not reaching one
in five who test positive, with perform-
ance and speed slightly down on last
week. It reached 79 per cent of people
who tested positive in the week to July
29, down from 82 per cent the week
before, while only 72 per cent of named
contacts were called and told to isolate,
down from 76 per cent.
Confirmed infections are also rising
again, with a 17 per cent rise to 4,
people testing positive. Although this is
partly the result of more testing, con-
centrated in hotspot areas, 1.3 per cent
of tests came back positive, up from 1.
per cent the week before.
Mr Burnham’s is one of several re-
gions launching their own contact trac-
ing system after losing patience with the
national scheme. “You have a national
call centre system that can pick up the
easy contacts but struggles with any-
thing more difficult,” he said.
“In Greater Manchester right now
about 52 per cent of the contacts of
people who test positive are beingsuccessfully traced — now that is no-
where near good enough with the
schools about to reopen.”
Test and trace chiefs insist that they
are setting up dedicated teams to liaise
with councils and have urged regions
not to go their own way.
Financial concerns are emerging as a
key reason why people do not engage
with the system or disobey instruction
to isolate. Mr Burnham said: “People in
the poorest communities find it very
hard to follow a request from Test and
Trace to self-isolate because they know
they won’t be paid if they do, or worse
they might lose their job. And that has
to be fixed if we’re to stop the spread of
this virus in our poorest communities.
“All employees need to be able to iso-
late immediately in the knowledge that
they will have their pay protected and I
think you need a system that’s akin to
jury service to allow the right decisions
to be made all of the time.”
People called up for jury service can
claim up to £129.91 a day after a fort-
night and although they are not re-
quired to, many companies continue to
pay staff who sit on juries.The National Audit Office is to
investigate government contracts for
protective equipment awarded at the
height of the pandemic amid an outcry
over the decision to spend more than
£150 million on unusable facemasks.
The Times revealed yesterday that
about 50 million masks bought without
a tender process from Ayanda Capital, a
London-based investment company
with no experience of government con-
tracts, had been deemed unusable for
frontline healthcare workers.
The government has admitted
during legal proceedings that concerns
about the safety of the masks meant
that they could not be used under
current NHS requirements.
It has now emerged that the NAO is
to launch an investigation into PPE
contracts after Labour demanded an
inquiry. In a letter to Rachel Reeves, the
shadow leader of the House of Com-
mons, sent on July 31, Michael Gove
wrote that “the National Audit Office
has already written” to the Department
of Health and
Social Care to
inform it of its
wish to start an
investigation.
“The govern-
ment looks for-
ward to work-
ing closely with
the NAO on
this,” he added. Mr Gove, the Cabinet
Office minister, said that he believed
that officials “balanced the urgent need
for PPE with the requirement to obtain
value for public money”.
The letter was published as Sir Keir
Starmer, the Labour leader, called for
an inquiry into how the £252 million
Ayanda Capital contract was awarded.
Sir Keir said yesterday: “For months
we were told that the government was
purchasing the right equipment for the
front line. Yet again it hasn’t happened.
There needs to be an investigation...
into what went wrong with this con-
tract because it’s just not good enough.”
Ministers overpaid by as much as
£50 million for coverings from Ayanda,
many of which turned out to be unusa-
ble, a leaked government document
seen by The Times reveals.
The masks had ear loops but require-
ments call for head loops. Ayanda has
blamed the government for the mis-Outcry over £150m of worthless
take, saying that the specification for
the intended masks were signed off by
officials before the deal was agreed.
The contract to supply the NHS in
England, signed in late April, was ar-
ranged by Andrew Mills, a government
adviser who also advises Ayanda’s
board. It covered 50 million FFP2 respi-
ratory masks and 150 million Type IIR
masks and was worth £252 million.
An internal government document
obtained by The Times reveals that offi-
cials paid far more for the masks
sourced through Ayanda than from
other suppliers. The average price for
FFP2 masks between April 14 and May
28 was £2.38, while Type IIR masks cost
51p on average, the document reveals.
At these prices, Ayanda’s contract
would have been £57 million cheaper.
The contract is one of three given for
PPE at the height of the pandemic
which are being challenged by the
Good Law Project. Jolyon Maugham,
who founded the campaign group, said
that the document suggested that offi-
cials “overpaid Ayanda by about £
million”. Although Ayanda Capital has
no history of
PPE procure-
ment, it was
awarded the
largest indi-
vidual con-
tract pub-
lished so far.
The order for
50 million
FFP2 masks placed with the company
amounted to the NHS’s anticipated de-
mand for an entire year.
Tim Horlick, who runs Ayanda,
which is owned through a company
registered in the tax haven of Mauri-
tius, declined to comment on the scale
of profits. “Ayanda submitted our offers
through the public PPE procurement
portal, which was at the time open to
any organisation or individual to put
forward offers to supply PPE to the UK
government during a period of national
emergency,” he said. “We understand
that all offers were benchmarked.”
Mr Mills, who advises the UK Board
of Trade, has said that his position
played no part in securing the Ayanda
contract. The government previously
said that it could not comment because
of active legal proceedings. Boris
Johnson said: “I’m very disappointed
that any consignment of PPE should
turn out not to be fit for purpose.”News Coronavirus
I
n the dogged search
for mass testing,
maybe dogs are the
solution (Tom
Whipple writes).
Scientists are calling
for volunteers in
northwest England to
take part in a trial to
identify the smells that
are unique to Covid-
infection and then see if
dogs can sniff them out.
The hope is their
sensitive noses will be
able to spot the signs of
coronavirus without the
need for laboratory
testing. Dogs could then
offer another means of
mass screening at
airports and in hot spots.
In the past decade
researchers have found
that dogs are able to spot
illness before it is even
apparent to the people
who are sick. This ability
was first noticed by
owners who claimed that
their dogs had spotted
they had cancer.
Although scientists
were sceptical, they
showed that dogs could
pick up subtle changes in
smell that were hidden to
human noses. Research
has now shown that they
can be used to diagnose
diseases such as malaria.
The charity Medical
Detection Dogs, working
with the London School
of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine (LSHTM), has
been working on training
dogs since the start of the
pandemic. Now it iscalling for people in the
northwest who think they
may be infected to come
forward to help them.
If people have
symptoms and are due to
have a test, or have just
had a test, they want
them to sign up to wear a
mask for three hours,
then send it in, along with
socks and T-shirt, to give
the dogs a scent to work
from. The hope is to
collect 325 positive and
675 negative samples.
These will be used to
pinpoint the smells
unique to Covid-19, which
can then be used to train
six dogs.
James Logan, head of
the department of disease
control at LSHTM, said
that having a team of
Covid-19 sniffer dogs
could be hugely
beneficial. “If successful,
this trial could
revolutionise how we
diagnose the virus,” he
said. “Rapid screening of
high numbers of people,
even if asymptomatic,
will help return our lives
back to some sort of
normality.”
The technique is
promising and has been
successful before but is
experimental. Until they
are able to identify the
compounds that signify
Covid-19, and then see if
they can train dogs to
sniff them out, scientists
will have no idea whether
or not they are barking
up the wrong tree.Wet noses could
sniff out Covid
and speed testing
vHow The Times reported the story yesterdayBilly Kenber Investigations Reporter‘I
started in mid-May. Since
then I’ve done two calls —
I know mate, it’s a joke. One
went straight to voicemail
and the other slammed the
phone down on me as soon as I said
who I was.
I sound like I’ve been in the
middle of the range. I know people
who’ve had no calls in that time and
some who’ve had four or five. You
still get paid even if you don’t take
any calls. I think I’m doing it for the
whole of England.
The job is online. Anyone can get
the job, I’ve got friends all over who
are working on it. You log on, you
see if there’s any work there to do.
You refresh the page, they ask youA tracer’s tale: Mostly you
sit about and watch Netflix
to do it every 15 minutes. When you
do get a call you follow a script.
It was really disorganised at the
start. The only training was a few
online modules, but the questions
don’t correlate to the training. You
have to pass a test of ten questions,
and about two of them were relevant
based on the training. You have to
get 100 per cent but everyone was
passing the answers around; there
have been groups on social media
sharing the answers. We did a bit of
Zoom training too.
Quite a lot of times at the start I’d
email to ask what to do. But they
don’t really actively try to help you.
There are continuing training
modules you do. You get asked
questions but there’s only so many
times you can read through it a day.
To be honest, most of the time you
sit around and watch Netflix. It’s an
absolute joke and it’s frustrating
seeing Boris on the TV saying it’s
working. It’s not.”an anonymous contact
tracer in england
spoke to ross kempsell
for times radio