NHS Test And Trace Appoints Sainsbury’s Boss To Run Testing, Leaked Email Reveals
Boris Johnson’s test and trace service faces fresh accusations of replacing NHS expertise with “unproven private sector solutions” after a former Sainsbury’s boss was appointed to a key role.
Mike Coupe, who once sang “we’re in the money” over a planned merger with Asda, will from October replace Sarah-Jane Marsh as testing director of NHS Test and Trace, it emerged on Tuesday.
Baroness Dido Harding, who runs the service overall, announced the appointment in an internal staff email leaked to the Health Service Journal.
HuffPost UK, which has obtained Harding’s full email, can reveal that she also claimed the testing team had hit every “target” that “they have ever been set”, a suggestion Labour said was “laughable”.
The so-called NHS Test and Trace service has come under repeated criticism for recent delays in availability of tests, despite claiming to have increased capacity from a few thousand to more than 250,000 a day since the pandemic started.
One shadow cabinet minister last week expressed fears that the service, which is not part of the NHS and outsources call centre work to private sector firms like Serco, “denigrates” the brand of the health service.
In her message to staff, Harding – herself a former boss of telecom firm TalkTalk – said Marsh was returning to her post as chief executive of Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.
Earlier this month, Marsh issued an apology to the thousands of people unable to get a test for Covid-19.
In her place, Coupe “will bring a wealth of experience in large scale supply chains, logistics and digital transformation”, Harding said.
The former Sainsbury’s boss, who stepped down from his role in May, “will undertake a period of induction over the next month, working with Sarah-Jane and the team across testing, initially focused on scaling new testing technologies, and will take over the testing helm when Sarah-Jane leaves us at the end of October.”
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