One Advertizer is very unhappy with the government's recent record, as Sarah Thursfield, from Llanymynech, penned this opinion to our letters page:

"Back in February and March, when the real threat of Covid-19 first became apparent, the government was late in responding but its total lockdown did achieve the much-needed reduction in infection rates.

It was clear at the time of the lockdown that any vaccine would be months or years in development and that the only way to relax the restrictions safely would be to set up a comprehensive system of testing and contact tracing.

They had from March until July to do this: a tall order, but not an impossible one.

A national testing system managed by local NHS trusts, utilising the experience of the sexual health clinics – which have been doing contact tracing for decades – and drawing on local authorities for personnel and local knowledge, could have achieved this.

If testing and tracing, with compensation given to anybody who lost money as a result of self-isolating, had been operating efficiently by July, we would not have infection rates heading for the sky again.

When the Prime Minister Boris Johnson refers to ‘NHS Test and Trace’ he’s misleading you.

The tracking and tracing was put in the hands of the outsourcing giant Serco.

This company was awarded the contract ‘to recruit and operate contact tracers’ under special procurement rules issued in January 2020: no competitive tender took place and there was no public tender advertisement.

It’s impossible to establish quite how much Serco has been paid for this work, as online searches give various responses, but figures over £100 million seem to be very much at the low end; and we’ve learned this week that less than two-thirds of contacts are being traced.

Even if contacts are notified, without financial compensation for quarantine some of them will still have to go to work just to survive.

Serco has had to use so many subcontractors to fulfil the contract that it doesn’t even know who is handling our personal data – or losing it because the whole thing is being run on stock office software.

And what of testing? We all know people who have been on the wild-goose-chase of trying to get a test, and have waited too long for results.

What do you expect of a system being managed by somebody with no relevant experience and a proud record of managing TalkTalk?

Dido Harding’s chief qualification for the job seems to be that she is part of a cosy clique.

And it gets better, because when she has finished making a pig’s ear of this job, Harding has been appointed to run the body which will replace Public Health England (PHE). By a curious coincidence her husband, Tory MP John Penrose, is a board member of a think tank which called for PHE to be abolished.

This isn’t even to start on the strange choice of companies which have received contracts for supplying PPE and other urgent services.

Our government is throwing money at its friends while refusing it to desperate freelance and self-employed workers, and denying free meals to hungry schoolchildren.

And the virus just keeps spreading.

The choice was posed as between containing infection or protecting the economy, but our government is spectacularly failing to do either."

Sarah Thursfield,

Llanymynech