MAJOR FAILURE OF COVID RELATED SERVICES AT UK BORDERS

Nearly 2 million passengers entered UK June to September 2020.

Launched by the Home Secretary, run by 2 private firms, the Isolation Assurance Service only made contact with 3.5% (66,800) to ensure they were isolating🤦‍♀️

2/ The Government’s half-hearted, privatised approach to critical COVID-related services also extending to virus control at Britain’s borders by the IAS appears to have failed to ensure self-isolation by international travellers.
Source: Private 👁 4-17 Dec 2020
3/ When launching the IAS in June, Home Secretary Priti Patel said Public Health England (PHE) would “undertake checks and ensure that people understand and are following the rules”....
4/ .... Later announcements revealed that the IAS would “attempt to contact randomly sampled arriving passengers to ensure that they are self-isolating”.
5/Sitel, the US call centre firm that shares the poorly performing contact tracing contract with Serco 🤦‍♀️, makes these calls

PHE wouldn’t say how much Sitel’s work is worth, & Govt hasn’t published details of the contract

Sitel already gets £310m for its contact tracing work😱
6/ The latest official data on health measures at the UK border reveal the Border Force spoke to 1.97 million passengers at airports & ports from 8 June to 7 September, taking their details, but Sitel’s IAS then made just under 150,000 calls or texts....
7/....Sitel made ‘successful contact with just 66,800 people - around 3.5% of all arrivals - to check they were self-isolating. After 4 attempts to contact travellers, Sitel gives up 🤬
8/ ....Lack of isolation by holidaymakers & business travellers may have been central to the UK’s 2nd wave.

Studies of COVID-19 mutations suggest that 59-80% of UK COVID cases since September feature a strain that first appeared in Spain in the summer....
9/ ....It’s striking that “controlling our own borders” was central to the Conservative election manifesto, but virus control at the border barely exists, with the advantage of being an island nation duly wasted....
10/ A new mutant strain is running rampant, a 3rd lockdown looks imminent - 30 countries have banned UK arrivals - Britain an international pariah.

Covid-19: More than 30 countries ban UK arrivals over Covid https://t.co/azMcnilcyH
11/ A Govt’s 1st duty is the protection of its people

Now more sickening news that @BorisJohnson Govt have failed in that duty yet again will cost more suffering, more lives

60,000⬆️Covid deaths. How much more failure & incompetence will it take before UK wakes up to reality?
@threadreaderapp unroll please

More from Government

This article by Jim Spellar for @LabourList misses the point about why Labour needs to think seriously about constitutional reform - and have a programme for it ready for government.


The state of our constitution is a bit like the state of the neglected electric wiring in an old house. If you are moving into the house, sorting it out is a bit tedious. Couldn’t you spend the time and money on a new sound system?

But if you ignore the wiring, you’ll find that you can’t safely install the new sound system. And your house may well catch fire.

Any programme for social democratic government requires a state with capacity, and a state that has clear mechanisms of accountability, for all the big and all the small decisions that in takes, in which people have confidence.

That is not a description of the modern UK state.
I am going to take the context for this thread from this piece by my good brother @mabziz in 2018-3 years ago. One thing I am so perturbed about is the response of our Attorney General's office to issues of state security. I have no personal grouse against @MalamiSan, but


2. I do have a professional grouse against him. I feel he is not alive to his duties. I feel that he is also not empowering his Director of Public Prosecutions or his Solicitor General. There is clearly a lot that befuddles me and this is because I am a seasoned lawyer and can't/

3. understand why law is not being used as the instrument it was designed for-to enforce law and order. Let us take the case of Nnamdi Kanu-this man was arraigned in Nigeria on a charge of treason/treasonable felony-he was on bail & he jumped bail. Why has he not been extradited?

4. Is it that Kanu is somehow bigger than Nigeria? What has happened to his surety who failed to produce him? Who is prosecuting him? Our Federal Ministry of Justice? Should Malami not explain to Nigeria why Nnamdi Kanu is still taunting Nigeria daily & still actively destroying/

5. our unity everyday. He is putting the lives of many people at risk and stoking ethnic dissent easily. The Fulani herdsmen dilemma, the burning of Lagos State and his coordination of same on phone-in radio channels, his videos are all stoking a Yoruba/Igbo carnage. Same with/

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