The Curious Incident of the Non-Existent Contact-Tracing App
This week on Prime-Minister's Questions, the PM asked Keir Starmer, the Labour leader if he could name one country who had a functioning contact tracing app, after the UK's bizarre choice to commission the NHS to take charge of possibly the most important software development project of the moment., only for it to miss several deadlines before the whole thing was consigned to the rather full rubbish bin of previously failed NHS software projects.
It comes as little surprise that Sir Keir immediately responded with “Germany – 12 million downloads”. If you would like to see the moment, here it is:
Germany, with possibly the most stringent privacy laws in the EU (and therefore the world) has released a contact tracing app on 15 June, and already 12 million Germans have downloaded it.
Germany is not the only country. Based on a cursory search on the Apple app store, you can see an eclectic mix of apps built by Australia, Japan, Switzerland, the US, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Bhutan, Maharashtra State (India), Malaysia, Pernambuco state (Brazil) and the list goes on.
It is true that most of these apps will not have the privacy features required in the UK, but it does show that even with the digital powerhouse that is the UK, the government is unable to organise itself enough to make one available at a time when it is easing lockdown.
As an aside, I have never believed that lockdown was effective. Our R0 number was below 1 as we entered lockdown in March, and it has not really moved since – basically because it's impossible to calculate accurately and is therefore just a best guess.
But the government DOES believe in the lockdown. So much so that it put the whole economy into a induced coma (Fraser Nelson's words in The Spectator, not mine, sadly). So given that such importance has been placed on social distancing and instituting draconian laws restricting our freedom, why give the very institution that messed up the pandemic preparations the responsibility for creating an app?
The answer, I fear, is that with Boris's absence in intensive care and no formal executive power handover, civil servants were free to do as they pleased and nothing pleases them more than to ignore experts in business. Matt Hancock agreed.
It still amazes me that people think that writing software is easy. Maybe they've been lulled by the fact that some non-expert keeps popping up to declare the end of programming – “it will all be automated” they say.
Have you noticed? Plenty of programmers still around. And it's not the programming that's the problem. It's the process that's difficult. writing automated test, making sure that the “master” code is as protected from bugs as possible, deploying, validating, improving. It takes an army to write a good scalable product. And of course, the product needs to be designed intuitively, easy to use despite the inherently complex way it operates.
So: you go to a doctor when you're ill, a hairdresser when you need a haircut, a mechanic when your car breaks down, a lawyer when you need to solve a legal problem, but you go to a healthcare employee when you need a contact tracing app? Really? I predicted right at the beginning of the process that it would be a failure. sadly I was right. Doctors & nurses are not software engineers. And if the NHS is employing software engineers, why are they doing that? What next: an NHS car wash, NHS supermarket?
The government needs to get a grip. I support Boris, but his team have not led this country through the pandemic well, and despite no doubt still recovering, this pandemonium still stops at his desk.
No 10: It's time to sort yourselves out. Get the app working (by the way, the code for the German one is here and free: https://github.com/corona-warn-app) and get the economy up and running, including travel and flights. Kill the social distancing rules and return the country to a normal footing. Not the media's “new normal” – just back to how we were, like the people on Bournemouth beach today.
We'll survive.
EDIT: Soon after posting this into a FB group, Benny pointed out that the image I had used as the post image still had Sajid Javid in it which made the whole thing a bit dated. Thanks for that, and the image has been replaced!
Joris
As per your ‘hubris of the NHS’ post, you are using the wrong scapegoat here. While Boris was away, it was Matt Hancock who came out to play, and via his personal ‘NHSX’ fiefdom commissioned highly professional software companies to do exactly the wrong thing. The narrative here is not of a dysfunctional organisation collapsing under its own weight, more that of a loaded gun wielded by a lunatic, with predictable results.
Blaming the civil service for the failings of idiot politicians is a relatively new phenomenon, largely introduced by idiot politicians such as BJ and the Donald’s cohort whose mission is to dismantle government. Their primary tool is incompetence, and they draw upon their respective civil services as a pool of suitable scapegoats for their own antics.
Karim Hyatt
Who do you think runs governments? The civil service. Every time they screw up, politicians get blamed, whether they did the right thing or not. This government has made quite a few mistakes, but nothing compared to the NHS who have consistently lied about their preparedness. No, this time, the blame falls squarely on the civil service who did not do their jobs.