Thank you for your support in signing our petition calling on the councils of NE London to set up local test-isolate-care-treat systems.

Since we launched the petition on 19 May, a number of things have changed nationally and locally.

Councils were already responsible for care home testing (from 7 May). But on 22 May, they gained additional responsibilities – with a new pot of £300m to meet them.

They now have to:

provide Tier 1 contact tracers to take on local ‘complex cases’ for the centralised Public Health England system, and
draw up plans and use local testing facilities to tackle outbreaks in local hotspots, using data supplied by the national Joint Biosecurity Centre.
Hackney and Newham (working with Camden and Barnet) have been picked as ‘best practice’ councils for the new arrangements. We understand why they see this as a victory. It’s undeniably better than being by-passed.

But this is NOT local ownership of public health. It’s far from being enough. The new arrangements are still controlled centrally by a badly managed contact tracing scheme, outsourced to Serco. It won’t be fully up and running till at least the end of June. Now that lockdown is being eased, we need local control over local data more urgently than ever. 

Our councils can and must do more. The East London Health and Care Partnership, which oversees the NHS across NE London, is seriously considering a model for a genuinely local scheme in Tower Hamlets. A detailed proposal has been put forward by the borough’s GPs, with backing from local academics, public health professionals and a housing association, who have come together to work together across the borough. This model could be rolled out to every borough in NE London, if councils worked with primary care to make it happen.

In a tweet sent on 20 May, Sir David Nicholson, former Chief Executive of NHS England, wrote: Irrespective of what the national plans are, tracing will end up being led locally and local authority based, so we’d better get ready.

We now need to redouble our efforts to get our local councils behind the local proposal. Please now urge everyone you know who lives and works in NE London to sign the petition and back this urgent call.