Recommendation 5

The Department for Health & Social Care’s failure to properly set up the market for travel tests put the public at risk of fraud and poor quality of service. DHSC required companies looking to conduct tests to be accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service. The first stage of this process only requires a self-declaration that companies meet DHSC’s minimum standards, but DHSC allowed companies making that declaration to be listed on gov.uk as providers of tests to the public. But 95% of companies failed the second stage of accreditation, which required providers to submit evidence to the accreditor, at their first attempt. By 28 January 2022, DHSC had removed 264 providers from gov.uk, 111 of which were removed because they had failed their second or third stage accreditation. We are deeply concerned that so many companies were listed on gov.uk, giving the impression that they had been approved by government when in reality they may not have met the required standards. Despite the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) warning of a “race to the bottom”, where the market competed on price alone, DHSC did not include any information about service quality on the gov.uk site. It similarly failed to respond formally to the CMA’s suggestions for improvement in April, May and September 2021. Recommendation: DHSC should set out, as part of its Treasury Minute response, why it did not take on board the CMA’s recommendations on the testing market, and which recommendations it would implement if health measures were re- introduced.