The government has spent over £1 billion setting up a network of testing labs, including this one in Milton Keynes. Hi, folks, im here at the Milton Keynes mega lab where theyre doing the most phenomenal amount of testing. But i find frustrated staff losing faith in the system. What do the xs mean . Every tube is a person you have to think that way. And probably quite a scared person or a worried person. As we begin to return to normal life, can we trust testing to help keep us safe . You just cannot run a service like this. Who is in charge here . Im so motivated to go in and really find out whats happening there. Its so important to get testing, right, its so important to get testing right, because essentially, thats our first line of defence with covid. Testing is a cornerstone of the governments fight against coronavirus. The most reliable tests are called pcr. Thousands of samples every day are sent here to one of the uks biggest labs, Milton Keynes. Panorama has been told by sources about poor practices at the lab. Its january, and im going undercover to investigate. Hi, hows it going . Oh, thank you. Im a science graduate with lab experience. Ive had 4. 5 days training and im being paid £13. 57 an hour as a lab technician. Right, well, good luck were disguising the identities of all the people im working with. Morning yeah, good. How are you . I start working in whats called the de bagging area. As soon as i start unpacking samples, i notice a number of the tubes they come in leak. The lab has to deal with at least eight different types of tubes. Were supposed to check for leaky ones when we open the bags. We do our best to clean up the leaks to try to prevent contamination, but were working fast and we dont always spot them. Panorama has asked two experts to review my evidence. Chris denning runs a University Lab that can do 2,600 coronavirus tests a day. If theres a faulty element in the pipeline, thats been if theres a faulty element in the pipeline thats been identified, then that needs to be addressed. If these are being handled inappropriately and they keep on breaking, that needs to be investigated. Phil robinson used to run a Genetic Testing Company doing millions of pcr tests. Yeah, its just not acceptable. There are multiple tubes. For a start, there should only be one. But youre telling me theres more than one and youve got ones that are leaking consistently. Whos in charge here . The government says that all tubes meet strict standards and that they work with suppliers to continuously improve processes. Over the past year, the uk has built up its Testing Capacity so more than 700,000 pcr tests can now be carried out every day. Milton keynes can do around 70,000 a day. By february, each team of two is told to sort eight lots of 93 samples every hour. The lab says its essential people get results quickly and that staff can work at that pace, regardless of how many samples actually arrive on any given day. Each sample and the bag it arrives in should have a bar code, and were supposed to check that they match. Its how we can be sure the results get sent to the right people. What we should also be looking out for is sample tubes arriving without bar codes on them. Otherwise, they could get lost in the system. Afterfour shifts opening bags, im moved to a new section. And its not long before we have a tube that doesnt seem to have a bar code. But it looks like nobody noticed the barcode was missing before they threw the bag away. She had to chuck one sample that didnt have a bar code on it, so that means, yeah, its not logged into the system, that person who took that test isnt going to get told a result and everyone talks about having at least a few a day of these sorts of samples. So, essentially, if thats getting missed at that stage, it results in a whole bunch of people not finding out. Do you find it easy to do all the checks and stuff whilst making the targets . To hit eight . Not really. If you try and put arbitrary targets on we must hit this number that puts undue pressure on people and then people are going to make mistakes or theyre going to rush it, because they feel it forces the operator. To basically cut corners. So, i guess from the labs perspective, they have to do a lot of tests, have to push people quickly. I understand that, but there are ways of making things l faster, and its not by doing things at lower quality because your process is incorrect. Last april, the Milton Keynes lab, which is run by a a not for Profit Company called uk biocentre, became the uks first coronavirus lighthouse lab. Hi, folks. Im here at the Milton Keynes mega lab, where theyre doing the most phenomenal amount of testing, which is absolutely essential for our ability to defeat the virus. After the pandemic started, the government moved to ramp up the uks community Testing Capacity. Milton keynes is one of seven Lighthouse Labs brought on stream by number 10. Nearly £6 billion has been set aside for them. More than £1 billion has been spent so far. When Milton Keynes began testing for coronavirus, academics from universities across the country offered their help. I was a small part of this tremendous team that established from nothing that i think generated a truly miraculous outcome. When i left in last year, the standards were still extraordinary and they still had a real focus there were individuals, particularly from oxford university, who had a real focus on quality. They were absolutely relentless that every sample would get tested and every sample would get put through. During the summer, many of the scientists left to go back to their full time jobs. Many of the 70 technicians on my team are recent graduates. There are 850 people working here now, and four different teams in the lab. Were you worried about standards and quality once you left the lab . I think there was a genuine change in the level of experience of the staff that werejoining, as compared to the ones that left. Every tube is a person you have to think that way. And probably quite a scared person or a worried person. We have a responsibility or certainly, when i was working there, had a responsibility to get those results back to them. When those academics left, there was a significant rise in the number of people taking tests. When schools and colleges returned after summer, the Testing System struggled to cope. A report by mps in march found the system never met the target of consistently getting results back within 2a hours. They said its not clear it can justify its unimaginable costs before the pandemic, there was already a network of smaller local and nhs labs, but they didnt have enough capacity. Sirjohn 0ldham is a Health Expert who has worked for five governments and ten secretaries of state. He believes it would have been better to focus on expanding the existing system. The test, track and trace was built, from my perspective, in the wrong way. If instead of having spent the billions we have creating a new system, wed spend probably less than that reinforcing the existing system, i think we would have been a lot better off. That failure contributed to a reason that we had a higher death rate and that we had the biggest economic hit from covid of any g7 country. The government says it has Built From Scratch the Largest Network of diagnostic Testing Facilities in british history which has carried out over 110 million covid tests. It says its worked with highly experienced partners in the public and private sector and made it clear that public authorities must achieve value for taxpayers. It says three new Lighthouse Labs have opened which are managed by local nhs trusts. Now, the uks Biggest Testing Lab has been hit by an outbreak of coronavirus. It has been reported that a number of scientists at the centre in Milton Keynes in buckinghamshire have been affected. Three months before that outbreak, the Health And Safety Executive had warned that workers here were being put at risk by insufficient cleaning and social distancing. Other people test positive, too, while im here in january and february. The lab says it has improved its Safety Standards and is meeting hse guidelines. But the labs social distancing rules are widely ignored. The lab has the capacity to run around 70,000 tests each day, but the number of samples actually arriving is much lower. During my time at the lab we usually did between 18,000 and 40,000 a day. A lot of the time, we dont have much to do. During the same week, the uk reaches one of many miserable milestones. Theres been more grim news on the coronavirus with the number of covid deaths recorded in the last 2a hours, more than 1,800. Thats yet another record since the pandemic began. Youve got one of the biggest covid labs in the uk not utilising their capabilities. 70 people doing nothing, machines not running, essentiallyjust paying a bunch of people to sit around. The government says its appropriate for labs to. . 0perate below Maximum Capacity so they can . Respond 0perate below Maximum Capacity so they can respond quickly to outbreaks and allow for training and maintenance. Whatever the number of samples arriving, we try to process them quickly. Ive now moved on to working with the robotic machines that are at the heart of mass testing. This one pipettes eight samples at a time onto processing plates. The pcr test is so sensitive, it can detect the slightest trace of coronavirus, so its essential theres no contamination. Some of the samples are quite thick and gloopy, and the machine is dragging them across whats supposed to be a clean plate. If a Gloopy Sample is positive, and it contaminates the plate, it could mean people being told theyre positive when theyre not. Having to self isolate when they dont need to. It looks like there could be contamination to me. But this technician whos training me on the machine doesnt seem to think its a problem. Technicians wipe off the Gloopy Samples with their gloves or a tissue. Terrible, beyond terrible. Very surprised that its been allowed to get to this low, low level. What youre seeing here is just absolutely crazy. Its crazy there is almost zero question that this would lead to contamination. The amount of virus and genetic material that is required to create a positive is absolutely minuscule. So, that action of touching it and then moving on to the next, and touching that and touching that, every time theres a point of contact like that, theres potential for as soon as you see that, just stop the system, find out what is going on, because, theres no point in carrying on with those samples because the chance of Contamination Isjust so high. The lab says operators are trained to stop the process run in progress, clean down the system and start the run again from scratch. Theres another problem. I also see the test swabs stick to the machines pipettes. My colleagues put their hand in the machine to push the swabs back down. Again, it feels like a Contamination Risk, so i ask my trainer what to do. The sticky swabs sometimes fall across other peoples samples. I see my colleagues handle swabs a lot. This is disgusting. This is the bit like just perhaps shocks me, just more than anything else that ive seen. If that solution has got a full infection in there of millions of particles and you start bouncing this around, naturally, little droplets are going to spray off in all Different Directions and theyre going to go into all the neighbouring tubes. This is not ok. Back when the lab opened, swabs were removed from the tubes before samples went through the machine. But the lab says it was time consuming and laborious, and trials it carried out showed leaving swabs in the tubes is safe and carries less Contamination Risk than removing them by hand. Our experts disagree. Theyre doing something which borders on criminal ina lab. This is about as disgusting as i have ever seen. Youre going to have false positives everywhere, so all these people are going to be told that they have covid when they havent. The lab says its training makes clear operators must pause the system to manually intervene. If contamination is suspected, the run must be stopped, the system cleaned down and a new run started from scratch. After each persons test is completed, results are checked by these scientists. Theyre responsible for quality control. This shows a plate of 93 results. The orange, xs are inconclusive results. This many suggests contamination. Its much better to have less numbers going through, but of higher quality, than hitting numbers that are meaningless, really. Lets face it, you know, if none of those results were any good whatsoever out of the 70,000, do you call it 70,000 or do you call it zero . From my team and two others, whose job it is to check the quality of results. They each show me plates they think are contaminated. 0ne says management wants to improve things, but two say every day hundreds of results are on plates they think are contaminated and should be retested. Each of those should either have a clear positive or a clear negative result on it that tells you what is going on in that sample. Itjust shouldnt be happening. If this happened once in a blue moon, well thats life, but as a standard . No. This scientist says he feels under pressure to simply declare the Orange Results void. If your result is void, you have to get another test, and that could mean waiting longer to find out if you have the virus or not. He thinks any plate with so many Orange Results, potentially caused by contamination, should be re tested. Instead, he says the negative results seen here marked green and the positive results seen here marked red are released. So, would you have any confidence in the positives on that plate . So, would you have any confidence in the positives on that plate . No, is the straight answer to that, if youve got that level of contamination on the plate, which shows as a positive, how do you know the positives are positive . The lab says it doesnt pressure staff and its Sample Void Rate is. It says there may have been isolated mistakes by individual staff, but that this is inevitable in a laboratory that processes up to 70,000 samples each day. Ive completed 18 shifts at Milton Keynes, over two months. What ive seen here makes me wonder if we can fully trust the system to handle our results properly, or even to get them right. I think mistakes are forgiveable. Not learning from them isnt, and for me that means moving it to a proper nhs test, track and trace, where its rooted in the local Public Health teams, rooted in Local Nhs Labs and facilities. This isnt going to go away, and we do need that greater resilience, and i have huge faith in people around the system to have the wherewithal, the intelligence to really get this right, and we need to get this right. The lab says this programme is an incomplete and selective representation of its efforts, and that while i was filming, it was operating under a unique period of pressure due to the second wave. It says it has contributed significantly to the pandemic response, it operates, in line with industry best practice, and has been recommended for accreditation by the regulator. The government says it demands the highest standards, takes concerns extremely seriously and will be fully investigating all the allegations that have been made. People in the lab tend to forget that these are real peoplepeople� ss samples. Youre Processing Hundreds of samples every day. Youre told to speed up, speed up, speed up. Yeah, its i think its very easy to forget that theres real people waiting at the end of this and what we do has consequences for those people. A third wave is spreading across europe. I hope the system weve invested so much money in, and so much faith in, can do what it was designed to do, and help keep us all safe. This is bbc news. Our top stories the bbc has obtained disturbing videos which appear to show the massacre of unarmed civilians in northern ethiopia. George floyds former girlfriend reflects on his life and their battle with addiction on day four of ex Police Officer derek chauvin� s trial. Police in belgium clash with thousands of people attending a hoax concert in brussels. And great news for eurovision fans as the dutch government will allow a Live Audience to watch the song contest in may