announced on social media as an april fools' day prank. now on bbc news, panorama. my name is jacqui wakefield. i'm secretly filming inside one of the largest laboratories testing for coronavirus in the uk. it's made me really angry and there's been times on shift where i've really had to bite my tongue. my evidence reveals how some people could be getting the wrong result. gasps. what you're seeing here is just absolutely crazy. there is almost zero question that this would lead to contamination.

the government has spent over £1 billion setting up a network of testing labs, including this one in milton keynes. hi, folks, i'm here at the milton keynes mega—lab where they're 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? i'm so motivated to go in and really find out

what's happening there. it's so important to get testing, right, —— it's so important to get testing right, because essentially, that's our first line of defence with covid. testing is a cornerstone of the government's fight against coronavirus. the most reliable tests are called pcr. thousands of samples every day are sent here to one of the uk's biggest labs, milton keynes. panorama has been told by sources about poor practices at the lab. it's january, and i'm going undercover to investigate. hi, how's it going? oh, thank you. i'm a science graduate with lab experience. i've had 4.5 days training

and i'm being paid £13.57 an hour as a lab technician. right, well, good luck! we're disguising the identities of all the people i'm working with. morning! yeah, good. how are you? i start working in what's 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. we're 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 we're working fast and we don't 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 there's a faulty element in the pipeline, that's been —— if there's a faulty element in the pipeline that's 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, it's just not acceptable. there are multiple tubes. for a start, there should only be one. but you're telling me

there's more than one and you've got ones that are leaking consistently. who's 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 it's 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 we're supposed to check that they match. it's 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, i'm moved to a new section. and it's not long before we have a tube that doesn't 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 didn't have a bar code on it, so that means, yeah, it's not logged into the system, that person who took that test isn't 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 that's 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 they're 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 it's 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 uk's first coronavirus lighthouse lab. hi, folks. i'm here at the milton keynes mega lab, where they're 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 uk's 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 it's not clear it can justify its "unimaginable costs" before the pandemic, there was already a network of smaller local and nhs labs, but they didn't 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, we'd 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 it's 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 uk's 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 i'm 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 don't have much to do. during the same week, the uk reaches one of many miserable milestones. there's been more grim news on the coronavirus with the number of covid deaths recorded in the last 2a hours, more than 1,800. that's yet another record since the pandemic began. you've 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 it's 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. i've 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 it's essential there's no contamination.

some of the samples are quite thick and gloopy, and the machine is dragging them across what's supposed to be a clean plate. if a gloopy sample is positive, and it contaminates the plate, it could mean people being told they're positive when they're not. having to self—isolate when they don't need to. it looks like there could be contamination to me. but this technician who's training me on the machine doesn't seem to think

it's a problem. technicians wipe off the gloopy samples with their gloves or a tissue. terrible, beyond terrible. very surprised that it's been allowed to get to this low, low level.

what you're seeing here is just absolutely crazy. it's 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 there's a point of contact like that, there's potential for as soon as you see that, just stop the system, find out what is going on, because, there's 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. there's another problem. i also see the test swabs stick to the machine's 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 people's 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 i've 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 they're 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. they're doing something which borders on criminal ina lab. this is about as disgusting as i have ever seen. you're going to have false positives everywhere, so all these people are going to be told that they have covid when they haven't. 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 person's test is completed, results are checked by these scientists. they're responsible for quality control. this shows a plate of 93 results. the orange, "x"s are inconclusive results. this many suggests contamination.

it's much better to have less numbers going through, but of higher quality, than hitting numbers that are meaningless, really. let's 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 shouldn't be happening. if this happened once in a blue moon, well that's 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 you've 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 doesn't 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". i've completed 18 shifts at milton keynes, over two months. what i've 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 isn't, and for me that means moving it to a proper nhs test, track and trace, where it's rooted in the local public health teams, rooted in local nhs labs and facilities. this isn't 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. you're processing hundreds of samples every day. you're told to speed up, speed up, speed up. yeah, it's — i think it's very easy to forget that there's 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 we've 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 floyd's 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.