UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

> I think this sort of thing has to be contextual.

The context is that UK government gave £22 BILLION to private companies for Test and Trace, and they wasted most of it contributing to the very high death rate to covid in the UK.

https://committees.parliament.uk/work/906/covid19-test-track...

> At times, parts of the national tracing service have barely been used: in May, DHSC signed contracts for the provision of 3,000 health professionals and 18,000 call handlers. The call handler contracts were worth up to £720 million. By 17 June, the utilisation rate (the proportion of time that someone actively worked during their paid hours) was low for both health professional (4%) and call handler staff (1%), indicating that they had little work to do. This means substantial public resources have been spent on staff who provided minimal services in return.

> National and local government have tried to increase public engagement with tracing, but surveys suggest that the proportion of contacts fully complying with requests to self-isolate might range from 10% to 59%. NHST&T acknowledges that non-compliance poses a key risk to its success and has taken steps to increase levels of self-isolation, for example by making follow-up calls to people while they are self-isolating. For as long as compliance is low, the cost-effectiveness of NHST&T’s activities will inevitably be in doubt.

That's one example. There are dozens of other examples.

> Companies awarded pandemic-related contracts include Randox, which received £479m for Covid testing. The firm pays Conservative MP Owen Paterson £100,000 a year as a consultant.

> Meanwhile, Dominic Cummings’s father-in-law Sir Humphry Wakefield is an associate of the director of Admiral Public Relations, which received £670,000.

> Health minister Edward Argar is a former senior executive at Serco, which is in charge of much of the contact-tracing system. The company’s chief executive is Rupert Soames, brother of ex-Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames.

> Public First, whose directors previously worked for Mr Cummings and Michael Gove, was also paid £840,000 for “focus group research”.

etc etc.

Then you've totally missed the point. People aren't arguing against the creation of a government research agency, they're arguing against the creation of one which makes it even easier for those in charge to put it to corrupt use. Remove the secrecy clause and the majority of the opposition disappears.

That this inscrutable agency is being set under a government with a record of misappropriating public funds for their personal gain is an aggravating factor and only servers as further proof as to why it's a terrible idea.

Most Brits either don't know about this, don't care, or think it's cool and are getting on with their shit.

I am personally thrilled by the announcement. I hope it works out well and we make something of it.

1000x this. First it's ignoring the opportunity cost, but there's also the lack of acknowledgement of staffing costs (as they are considered sunken) - the person's pay was already budgeted for, but the £10 book hasn't been budgeted for. Also using up the time of senior (valuable and expensive) people in these kinds of processes. The argument is always that it prevents fraud or corruption, but anyone who knows internal processes would realise that there are far easier (and more lucrative) ways to commit fraud or corruption than the travel expenses system, that would be far harder to detect, and far easier to explain away.

2 more big problems that need solved (one of which alludes to your point):

- Your book is a capital expenditure, but the people administering the kakfa-esque process of approving your expenses are paid as opex. Your department has an Opex budget it aims to spend each year. There's no recognition that "money is money" -- if your budget is for capex, it cannot be used to buy a book! And vice versa! In some organisations (generally handling research grants), money is further ring-fenced into buckets like "Travel & subsistence" and "consumables". Even mid-pandemic, good luck spending money set aside for Travel & subsistance on a consumable, even one arising directly from not being able to travel...

- Annualised accounting, meaning budgets disappear into thin air on the 5th of April, thus driving spend to happen sooner than it needs to, and creating a culture of "spend it or lose it" - the inability for funds to roll over, even when there's a good reason, leads to programmes being pushed to spend more money faster. Letting funding roll over, by allocating budgets as "cash" would be so much more effective.

I hope ARIA will be able to escape from annualised accounting and simply spend its budget, without worrying about capex/opex etc.