TEST and Trace bosses treated taxpayers “as if they were an ATM machine,” Labour charged today after a panel of MPs found that the programme had failed to deliver despite spending £37 billion. 

The public accounts committee said that the scheme’s outcomes had been “overstated” or not met, despite it receiving lavish funding, equivalent to a fifth of the annual NHS budget. 

In a highly critical report published today, the committee said that the programme’s continued over-reliance on consultants — paid a whopping £1,100 a day on average — probably cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds.