Quote Originally Posted by cyril evans awaydays View Post
PHE is an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care not an autonomous quango as you state i.e it is part of the Civil Service and staffed by civil servants and Matt Hancock is directly responsible for it, its responsibilities, budgets and plans. Though to be fair if you got your information on its governance from, say the Daily Mail then you could be forgiven for thinking it is a quango sitting far more outside the control of Ministers.

Fortunately there are more informative sources such as the Institute for Government which explain its relationship, how it was established by the Cameron government and how its integration within and accountable to a government department abolished about 70 of those nasty autonomous quangos you reference.

https://www.instituteforgovernment.o...health-england

That seems less pertinent than who is responsible for the testing and tracing programme though. As previously discussed this is led by Dido Harding. She reports directly to Boris Johnson and the Cabinet Secretary (if we had one) and not to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. (see Government Announcement). She is supported in this role by John Newton of PHE.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/n...amme-appointed

Other than Newton's supportive role it is not clear where PHE fits in the testing and tracing governance. What is clear is that it is not responsible for it. That sits fully in the hands of a Tory Peer reporting directly to the Prime Minister.

If you want to change your view that PHE is responsible for the 25,000 tracers who have contacted an average of less than two people each since test, track and trace was introduced from a simple yes to a simple no now would be a good time I guess.
You are a pedantic individual.

PHE is responsible as I mentioned earlier. Dido Harding was brought in to supposedly sort out T&T but that does not take the overall accountability away from PHE who are responsible for' preparing for and responding to public health emergencies. There is no other organisation in England with this responsibility.

PHE has been sadly lacking in this pandemic but that does not take away its responsibilities. In late April England Health Minister Jo Churchill told PHE that it needed to adjust its organisational activities and resourcing of priority activities in line with the scale of response to Covid-19'

A spokesperson for PHE very recently replied to the PMs non specific comments about sluggish response by some organisations said..' PHE is playing a key role in our response working on important issues such as detection, surveillance, contact tracing and testing. Were have made changes to our structure already, for instance WE HAVE SET UP FROM SCRATCH NHS TEST & TRACE and the Joint Bio-security centre'

So its not just me that say PHE is responsible, they are saying it themselves