SERCO, who were recently fined £2.6m for ‘accommodation failings’ while handling asylum seekers and were forced to apologise for breaching data protection rules on another test-and-trace contract, appear to have won yet another government contact-tracing contract, worth £108m.
That’s not the first time SERCO have been fined either. They’d been hit with a £1m fine the year before for issues with another asylum-seeker accommodation contract. Of course who could forget the £22.9m fine they racked up over electronic tagging scandal, when the Serious Fraud Office caught up with them in July last year. Richard Burgon even called for a special audit of all existing SERCO contracts (worth £3.5billion) at the time. Addressing parliament, Burgon asked ministers to reassure the house that the then Justice Minister, Edward Argar, was not involved in overseeing any SERCO contracts, as Argar had previously worked as SERCO’s “chief spin doctor”. What might shock some folks is that SERCO had landed themselves a £68m fine back in 2013 for doing pretty much the same thing.
Worth noting here that SERCO’s group chief executive is Rupert Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson and the brother of Nicholas Soames (the former Shadow Secretary of State for Defence).
