The Test and Trace team based in England and Wales hired digital specialists to provide customer support roles which the department was unable to fill with skilled civil servants.

According to published procurement documents, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) signed a six-month contract with transformation consultancy North Highland to improve its customer service experience.

The £1.95 million contract covered the hiring of 35 staff, including developers, designers and project managers, costing a total of £39,051 per day for the 50-day period of the contract.

It was indicated by the DHSC that the outside hires were necessary after being unable to find the “required skills” from within the civil service.

According to the contract, the design and product roles are “highly specialised digital, data and technology roles” and NHS Test and Trace “does not have sufficient staff with the necessary skills and experience” to form the correct team without external support.

“It is NHS Test and Trace’s intent to recruit a team consisting of civil servants in the future. We anticipate that this will take a minimum of six months and we, therefore, require… to use the resources provided under this contract as a short- to the medium-term solution while we create a more permanent team to take over,” the contract said.

The aims of the established customer experience team, the contract states, was to “ensure that work to create new services, or enhance existing ones, is done with the customer in mind, and [that] services are not built-in isolation, but consider the end-to-end journey including overall coherence and consistency, as well as the wider issues of delivering positive customer experience.

“Members of CX squads will work closely with the Test, Trace and Contain divisions to develop deep subject knowledge of the projects they are involved in and will use their experience to identify appropriate design solutions,” the contract added.

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The test and trace systems have been beset by major problems since their first inception at the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year.

Several early iterations of the app struggled to materialise and were eventually scrapped after concerns around data protection and restrictions imposed by tech firm Apple.

Restrictions surrounding Bluetooth and third-party apps placed on a previous version of an app trialled on the Isle of Wight caused only 4% of iPhone users to be detected by the software after the app ‘slept’ when the handsets were not in use.

Additionally, privacy rights groups Big Brother Watch and the Open Rights Group threatened the UK Government with legal action in October last year following reports that personal details have been misused for marketing purposes.

In September, further data protection concerns were raised after it was announced that hospitality venues are required to collect personal information as part of new contact tracing laws, an issue that will soon become more prevalent as Britain begins to re-open as we emerge from a second nationwide lockdown.