Serco has won an additional £45m to provide COVID test centres, openDemocracy has reported. The 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.
openDemocracy also reports 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”.
Full story on openDemocracy, 17 September 2020
