UK government advertises £2,000-a-day job to fix ‘failing’ test and trace

Health department seeks executive to turn around system that PM admits needs to ‘improve’

Coronavirus test
Swabs underway at a coronavirus drive-through testing station for NHS staff in Chessington
(Image credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

The government has advertised for a director of operations to “implement improvements” to the coronavirus test-and-trace service that Boris Johnson yesterday admitted is failing to hit turnaround targets.

The recruitment ad says that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is seeking a temporary “VP of operations” with experience “in running call centres of 18,000”. The successful candidate will have “experience (and evidence) of turning around failing call centres” and “examples of quick wins”, says the listing, which offers pay of up to £2,000 a day.

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  Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.