£430 million for a step-counter app!

The Tories have announced a £430 million slush fund to create a new NHS app to snoop on our step counts, but they're very coy about what the data is going to be used for, and who gets the contract

The Tory Health Secretary Victoria Atkins has announced a new £430 million slush fund to create a new NHS app to snoop on our heart rates and step counts, but the Tories are being very coy about what the data is actually going to be used for, and who gets the contract.

There are several key questions that need answers:

Why recreate what’s already available for free?

Given that there are literally dozens of free phone based health monitor apps already available (which obviously cost less than four hundred million each to develop), why is the Tory government intent on recreating existing technology at such lavish expense?

The only difference between all the freely available products and the new snooping app (other than the obscene price tag) seems to be that the Tory one will be linked up to your medical records, National Insurance Number, etc.

How can a step-counter app cost £430 million?

£430 million seems like an awful lot of money to develop the kind of phone-based step counter app that’s already commonly available for free through app stores, until you consider the astonishing £29.5 billion price tag for just two years of Dido Harding’s shambolic Test and Trace fiasco.

As far as the Tories and their millionaire private health donors are concerned, the NHS is a vast cash cow. Why would British capitalists bother to innovate and create new markets when they can just siphon £billions out of the NHS on lucrative contracts for stuff like recreating existing technology?

Frank Hester’s violent and racist rant about Diane Abbott didn’t just expose sickening Tory hypocrisy over extremism and abuse of MPs, it also shone a light on how private profiteers are reaping vast sums out of the NHS.

Hester’s TPP companies have been awarded £440 million in NHS and social care contracts since 2016, and then he’s somehow allowed to kick back £10 million in donations to the political party that signed off on all these lucrative contracts in the first place!

If you look at the NHS as an opportunity to generate vast profits for your mates, rather than a public health service, then blasting a whopping big mountain of cash on a step-counter app makes an awful lot more sense.

Who gets the contract?

The Tory party refuses to say who this vast £430 million contract has been awarded to, but it’s not difficult to guess what kind of company will be lined up for it.

If it’s not Infosys (Rishi Sunak’s father in law), it’s surely going to be one of the other parasitical outsourcing companies that gorge themselves on government contracts (Serco, Capita, G4S, Virgin, Palantir, Sodexo, Atos, TPP, etc) isn’t it?

Who gets the data?

If the main purpose of this overpriced recreation existing technology is to do it in a way that allows state collection of people’s day-to-day health data, we’ve got to wonder who ends up getting their hands on all of this potentially lucrative information.

You must have been living under a rock if you don’t know about how the Tories have repeatedly sold NHS patient data to private health outfits, drug companies, insurers, and the like.

And you’d also have to be rather naive to imagine that other government departments beyond the Department of Health wouldn’t want to get their hands on millions of people’s health and activity metrics.

What’s the data for?

Atkins was absolutely clear that the objective of this project is to collect patient data on metrics like heart rate and step count, but the Tories have refused to properly explain what the purpose of this data harvesting exercise actually is.

Atkins made the deeply sinister claim that the app would have a "really important role" in reducing the number of people who are off work and claiming sickness and disability benefits.

Given the Tories’ sickening history of psychologically torturing sick and disabled people via degrading and profoundly inaccurate "fit for work" assessments (also run by private outsourcing profiteers), it’s not hard to imagine them forcing severely disabled people and the terminally ill to sign up to their new data snooping app as a condition of receiving their paltry disability benefits.

Maybe they’d extend the conditionality to anyone claiming unemployment benefits, in-work benefits, or accessing NHS services too?

However, despite Atkins concerning disability scapegoating rhetoric, the government says that "the parameters of how the app could be used are still in development".

How do they know how much it costs then?

If they say they don’t even know "how the app could be used" how is it possible for them to know that the price tag is £430 million?

Could the money be better spent?

Surely anyone could think of a better way of spending nearly half a billion quid than paying private profiteers to help the government snoop on citizens private health metrics.

The average nurse’s salary in the UK is roughly £35,000 a year, so £430 million would pay the wages of more than 400 extra nurses to work 30 year careers in the NHS.

Maybe simply advising patients to use free off-the-shelf apps to monitor their own health metrics and paying for 400+ extra nurses would be a better use of the money?

But then that wouldn’t involve any lucrative contracts for Tory-connected private health profiteers, or the collection of valuable patient data to be misused by government or flogged off to private insurance companies that would absolutely love to get their hands on information about all of our heart rates, activity levels, etc.

If you sign up for the free subscription, you can still support AAV by setting up a small monthly donation via GoCardless (these really help).