Test and Trace consultants are being paid a staggering salary of £1.5m a year which dwarfs public sector salaries, new reports suggest.

Some executives from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) helping the government set up and run its testing system are being paid day rates of around £7,000 – equivalent to an annual salary of around £1.5m.

The scheme which has been developed under the UK’s Tory regime is believed to have needed a budget of around £12 billion.

And consultants have demanded the eye-watering daily fees from this budget and it seems the British government have been happy to hand it to them.

The track and trace app enables citizens to register their details through an app out in public – such as at pubs and restaurants – so that if anyone comes down with the Covid-19 virus (which has a survival rate of 99.986% of anyone who catches it) those who were in the facility at the same time as the infected can be traced and told to self-isolate for 14 days ‘just incase’ they have it too.

Boston Consulting Group is known in the UK as being one of the most prestigious and demanding consultancy groups and senior executives have shown this with the demand in daily rate.

Most rates are between £2400 and £7000 with those in senior roles getting the higher rates.

This has caused anger amongst the UK public with many taking to social media to voice their outrage.

One user on Reddit said: “I’m tired of this. How are the rest of the British public also not tired?

We sacrificed our livelihoods, our freedoms, our mental health and more so these lot could sort out a test and trace system and they failed to do that. We should be angry. We should be pissed off.

£1,500,000 in salary? Are you bloody kidding me? This is absolutely insane. It’s ludicrous. It’s criminal. It’s corrupt. The damn thing doesn’t even work.

If it did work we could maybe have some semblance of normality again. But it doesn’t. And we, the taxpayer, has paid through the arse for a crock of s***.”

Labour MP Toby Perkins raised the matter during a House of Commons debate on contact-tracing on Wednesday afternoon.

“Occassionally you get a story that seems, in itself, to demonstrate a much wider point,” he told MPs.

“And so it was today with the scoop revealed by Ed Conway of Sky News that the government is paying, on a daily rate, £7,360 per day to the management consultants at Boston Consulting Group, who are in charge of test and trace.

“Equivalent to a £1.5m salary to individuals as a day rate, to preside over this shambolic sight that is letting down all the people in my constituency and in so many others.”

Mr Perkins called for “dedicated public servants” to be drafted into the test and trace system.

“You won’t find dedicated public servants being paid £7,500 per day, you won’t find them on £1.5m, but what you will find is a basic competence, a knowledge of their area, a desire to make sure that the systems work before they are implemented,” he said.

“And that is what we need right now in our system.”

Referring to his previous career in the sales industry, Mr Perkins also told MPs: “I never came across a customer nearly as naive as what we have with the government.”

“I just wish that at some point in my life I could have come across a customer with as much money as the government has, as willing to be so easily impressed as this government is, and as willing to give it to people and then defend the people who let them down as a supplier,” he added.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson responded: “NHS Test and Trace is the biggest testing system per head of population of all the major countries in Europe.

“It’s processing 270,000 tests a day and nearly 700,000 people who may otherwise have unknowingly at risk of spreading coronavirus have been contacted.

“To build the largest diagnostic network in British history, it requires us to work with both public and private sector partners with the specialist skills and experience we need. Every pound spent is contributing towards our efforts to keep people safe as we ramp up testing capacity to 500,000 tests a day by the end of October.”

Boston Consulting Group declined to comment.

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