Boris Johnson has been accused by Keir Starmer of “losing control” of test and tracing and being “out of touch” with how coronavirus is affecting the daily lives of people.
The Labour leader launched an angry attack on the Prime Minister, expressing frustration over how Johnson has flip-flopped on the importance of testing.
Starmer accused the Prime Minister of “pretending there isn’t a problem” with the Government’s Covid-19 testing regime, while Johnson said the UK is testing “more people than any other European country”.
The UK Government has come under sustained attack over the testing programme, which has seen people told to travel hundreds of miles to get tests.
Scottish Health Secretary Jeane Freeman has admitted Scotland's testing network has fewer than half the contact tracers promised by the SNP Government by summer.
In tetchy exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions Starmer asked why the PM said on Tuesday that the Test and Trace system has “very little or nothing” to do with the spread or the transmission of Covid-19, after previously hailing it as a game-changer.
The Labour leader added: “Both positions cannot be right – which one is it, Prime Minister?”
Johnson gave an evasive reply about test and trace, referring to how the failing system was giving “granular detail where the epidemic is breaking out, exactly which groups are being infected”.
Starmer replied: “Pretending there isn’t a problem is part of the problem, Prime Minister.”
He added: “Is the explanation from the PM that we haven’t got enough capacity because nobody could have expected the rise in demand? That’s the Dido Harding defence – or is it we’ve got all the capacity we need, it is just that people are being unreasonable in asking for tests? That’s the Matt Hancock defence. So which is it?”
The Prime Minister moaned that continued criticism of the under-fire testing chief Dido Harding was "unseemly and unjustified" despite widespread shortages of tests.
He added: “We are testing more people than any other European country … we’re going to go up to 500,000 tests by the end of October.”
The Prime Minister said he wanted to see “more of the spirit of togetherness that we had yesterday”.
On testing in schools, Starmer highlighted that one in eight children in England are off school this week, adding: “How on earth did we get into this mess?”
He then accused Johnson of being “out of touch” with the experiences of parents with school-age children.
He added: “The Government’s own department shows that one in eight children are off school this week. That disrupts their education. Whether it’s Covid symptoms or other symptoms is nothing to the point.
“If the Prime Minister doesn’t see that, he’s really out of touch with families and what they’re going through in schooling day in, day out in the last few weeks.
“The reality is losing control of testing is a major reason why the Prime Minister is losing control of this virus.”
