In 1984 I was appointed director of the government-sponsored National Interactive Video Centre. The centre was established to operate as a neutral information point for anyone interested in what were then emerging technologies. From the early days we saw many civil servants and politicians, all of them eagerly pursuing the question of whether untested, untried, and even not-yet-invented technologies could answer very pressing needs that they had failed to solve any other way.
Whatever the technology might have been able to do, these eager beavers invariably overlooked two situations. First, as the film I, Daniel Blake showed so powerfully, many of the intended target audiences were not equipped to meet the technological requirements (and still aren’t). Second, in many situations, most people prefer to talk to a person, which is why expertise held at a local level and delivered through local authority one-stop shops were such a necessary service. Almost always angels would have feared to tread.
Angus Doulton
Bere Ferrers, Devon
• Your article (UK abandons contact-tracing app for Apple and Google model, 18 June) notes that Italy and Germany have contact tracing apps that have been working for some time. Why doesn’t our government buy and adapt one of those, rather than wasting time and money developing our own? Am I missing something?
Lawrence Greenberg
Southgate, London
• The multimillion-pound “world-beating” Covid-19 contact tracing app, which government ministers have been falling over themselves to promote to us, will now not be ready until winter at the earliest. And the other £46m government “spinner” for tracing and tracking the virus, which is meant to prevent a lethal second wave, may not be functioning properly until the autumn.
But the NHS already had a highly experienced army of contact tracers, specialists who deal with sexually transmitted diseases and know confidently how to deal with people’s private information and how to find who they have been in contact with.
The contract ought to have been given to them, but instead, because this government is constantly trying to use the coronavirus crisis to further privatise our beloved NHS, it has been given to Serco, who have already subcontracted half the contract. Is this how Boris Johnson treats us?
Mark Holt
Brighton-le-Sands, Merseyside
