Recommendation 22

At the time of the NAO’s report, NHST&T provisionally estimated that it had spent £372 million on agency and contractor staff and £195 million on consultancy fees, compared with £52 million on permanent and seconded staff in 2020–21. It had not yet completed its year-end checks, and anticipated that the amount recorded as consultancy spend would increase. However, the NAO’s own enquiry on contract spend indicated that NHST&T was expected to spend £300 million on the top 10 consultancies with the highest contract values.49 We were concerned that NHST&T’s consultancy expenditure may have gotten out of hand. The previous Head of NHST&T explained that the nature of the pandemic had meant that NHST&T had needed to bring in contingent, short-term labour from all parts of society, including the Army, civil servants, volunteer contracts, unpaid staff, as well as consultants. They explained that NHST&T needed to rely on consultants in part because some of the skills it needed did not exist in the civil service, and partly because the nature of the pandemic response meant the roles available were temporary rather than 43 Committee of Public Accounts, COVID-19: Test, track and trace (part 1), Forty-Seventh report of Session 2019–21, HC 932, 10 March 2021, para 3 44 Q 129, C&AG’s Report, para 13 45 Q 135 46 Qq 136, 141 47 Qq 132–133 48 Letter from Sir Chris Wormald, Department for Health and Social Care, and Dr Jenny Harries, UK Health Security Agency, to Rt Hon Meg Hillier MP, Chair of Public Accounts Committee, 4 August 2021 49 Qq 129, 138; C&AG’s Report para 2.20 Test and Trace update 17 permanent. The Chief Executive of the UK Health Security Agency confirmed that it had a “very detailed ramp-down plan” to reduce the number of consultants by the end of March 2022.50 In their subsequent letter to us, the Department and the future Chief Executive of UKHSA told us that NHST&T had reduced the number of consultants from a peak of 2,504 to 1,864 over the previous four months. The