UK’s NHS COVID contact-tracing app receives funding for rest of year

The UK's contact-tracing app has been given £2.5 million in funding after a deal was done with a specialist supplier to keep providing support and development work for the app for the rest of the year.

The app, which has been downloaded over 30 million times and cost at least £100 million to develop, is now being run by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). However, with the UK government scrapping the legal requirement for those with a positive test to isolate and manual contact-tracing operations closed, long-term plans for the technology are not clear.

The support contract was established on February 14 with an end date of December 31, according to a government announcement. The UKHSA did not immediately comment on whether they plan to renew the contract next year.

The supplier for this new contract is Netcompany, an IT services organisation headquartered in Denmark with offices around the globe including the UK (London and Leeds), Norway, Vietnam and Poland.

This is not the first time Netcompany have been involved with the UK's contact-tracing programme. In November 2020, the UK government awarded the company a year-long contract for “Alpha, Beta and Live support services to NHS Test and Trace”.

Meanwhile, the contract notice for the new funding for the contact-tracing app states that staff supplied by the firm will be expected “to work collaboratively with internal UKHSA teams to deliver a range of mobile app development services and support the existing systems AWS infrastructure”.

While the contact-tracing app has been funded for another year, a COVID-19 symptom tracking app has had its funding pulled. The symptom-tracking app was developed by King's College London (KCL), alongside Guys & St Thomas' hospitals and London and Boston-based nutritional-science start-up ZOE, co-founded by KCL Professor of Genetic Epidemiology Tim Spector.

That app, which was launched on March 24, 2020, had been supported by a grant from the UK Government Department of Health and Social Care. However, when UKHSA gained oversight of contact-tracing operations, it declined to renew the project's funding.

Posting on Twitter, Spector said: “I'm disappointed to share that the ZOE COVID Study hasn't had its funding renewed by UKHSA. But we're carrying on and looking forward to the next steps, looking at a whole host of health conditions as well as COVID.”

Contact-tracing in the UK

The development of the UK's contact-tracing app was a long and complicated journey. The first attempt was scrapped in June 2020, after the UK Government attempted to build a centralised version of the untested technology, which lacked support by Google and Apple and explicitly violated the tech companies' privacy policies.

A working version of the app was finally rolled out in September of that same year. However, as the pandemic entered its second year, there were wide-spread reports of people deleting the app or turning off the contact-tracing element after 700,000 people in England and Wales were told to isolate in the space of one week.

Those caught up in the so-called “pingdemic” included Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer.