We spend £4 billion and change a year on Public Health England

One of the tasks that we charge to Public Health England is to concern itself with, well, public health. Things like pandemics say. Or testing of the population for diseases. Public health. It being worth pondering what we get for our £4 billion and change:

Britain turns to Portugal for Covid tests that could prevent disease spread and deaths despite ban on travel to country

Outbreaks in the population and asymptomatic carriers could be detected far earlier for a fraction of the price if the UK adopted the test

Well, yes, that’s very nice. The tactic is simple enough, it’s pooled testing. Mix up the samples from 10 or 50 people, test and if negative then you know that all 10 or 50 are disease free. If positive then retest with smaller groups within that 10 or 50 until the infected are personally identified.

This is not to sneer at the University of the Algarve who have been doing this. The target of ire is in the UK:

Officials and scientists from the UK Science and Innovation Network met with Mr Marques and his team last month.

Note that that’s not anyone from Public Health England. But rather more than just this, the idea of pooled testing has been around for some time now. March at least. For £4 billion a year we might expect that one or another person within PHE might read the occasional blog on the subject but apparently not.

There’s also that contact tracing app. Ireland managed to get it right apparently:

Cheap, popular and it works: Ireland's contact-tracing app success

Irish-made app has more than 1.3m downloads, in stark contrast to the UK’s efforts

So that’s good news. How did they do it?

NearForm employs 150 people and builds software mostly for private clients.

They contracted it out to people who know how to build software.

Then Apple and Google came together and offered an app that would support public health apps and let Android and iOS phones connect even while locked. Their decentralised version held no data in a single official database, alleviating privacy concerns.

The Irish were among the first to grasp Silicon Valley’s offer in late April.

They used the only underlying structure - that from Apple and Google - which could possibly allow such an app to work. Rather than trying to cobble together something that couldn’t possibly work but would have the merit of being home grown. Oh, and cost £11 million or so rather than the £800,000 Ireland spent.

So, what do we gain for our £4 billion spent on PHE? If not the actual public health and pandemic stuff that we think we should be getting? Well, it’s now not possible to advertise bacon or butter on the Tube, supermarkets are about to be banned from selling us two pizzas for the price of one and the choccie biccies will be hidden around the back.

Aren’t we the lucky ones to have such an active and efficient bureaucracy at our beck and call?