Former NHS Test and Trace boss Baroness Dido Harding is responsible for the “disappearance” of £37 billion of public money.
£37 billion was the budget for Test and Trace in its first two years. As of June 2022, £25.7 billion had reportedly been spent on the system.
A post in the style of a ‘wanted’ poster showing a mocked up picture of former NHS Test and Trace boss Baroness Dido Harding has been shared on social media.
The poster reads: “WANTED: In connection with the disappearance of £37 billion of public money”.
As we have written many times before, £37 billion was the budget for NHS Test and Trace in its first two years—not what has actually been spent.
The government allocated a total of £22 billion in 2020/21 to the scheme, and a further £15 billion in 2021/22, or £37 billion in total.
The most recent figures produced by the National Audit Office (NAO) show that, as of the June 2022 update, £25.7 billion had reportedly been spent on NHS Test and Trace as a whole, with an estimated lifetime cost of £29.3 billion.
The programme included Covid-19 testing services (accounting for the vast majority of spending), ‘contain’ activities such as identifying local outbreaks, contact tracing services and the Covid-19 contact tracing app.
Image courtesy of Annie Spratt
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because £37 billion was the budget for NHS Test and Trace, not what has been spent.
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