Westminster prevents English public health officials from fulfilling their statutory duty

That is the charge brought by this week's Inside Health special Covid-19 programme on Radio 4.

In this special edition of Inside Health Dr Margaret McCartney investigates the serious questions being raised about the UK's public health response to trying to stop the spread of the virus, and how tension, over the performance of the government's Test and Trace programme, has spilled out into the open.

Margaret hears from Directors of Public Health who feel that their role and expertise in local communities working closely with local Public Health England teams has been overlooked. Instead a new national Test and Trace system has been set up using private companies outside the traditional public health infrastructure. The DPH for Wigan and lead director of public health for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Professor Kate Ardern, tells Margaret she believes government didn't understand the role and the experience of local public health teams and so instead of empowering them to oversee test, trace and isolate services, set up a new national system, from scratch, using private companies without public health experience. And the data needed locally to identify and deal with Covid cases, she tells Margaret, just hasn't come through. This is despite the fact that the law is clear; Covid is a notifiable disease and local directors of public health should receive the information.

One wonders whether the pressure from commercial organisations to acquire centrally-gathered data is determining government policy as much as ignorance of the structure of government, central and local, in this country.