Recommendation 18

NHST&T told us the biggest lesson it had learnt from the last year was that “you can only deliver this sort of service as an integrated team of all the different organisations, institutions and individuals in the country”. It said it had learned a lot about “how to build this coalition between local government and national Government, the NHS, the broader public sector and the private sector—and, ultimately, with the general public as a whole”.65 However, a range of stakeholders have queried why local authorities and NHS primary care bodies were not more directly involved in the government’s approach to test and trace from the outset, given their existing networks, experience and expertise.66 For example, the Local Government Association felt that a lack of consultation with local areas had led to test centres being set up in places that many people had difficulty getting to. Since July, local authorities have assumed a bigger tracing role, setting up their own locally run contact tracing schemes to cover the minority of cases that the national service cannot reach, working in conjunction with NHST&T.67