panorama goes undercover inside a lab analysing covid—19 tests, revealing a failing service with staff under pressure, equipment malfunctioning and tests wrongly discarded. 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. 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 a billion pounds 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. every tube is a person. you have to think that way. and probably quite a scared person or 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's 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 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 four and a half 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 that a number of the tubes that come in leak. the lab has to deal with at least eight different types of tubes. we are 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 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'sjust 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 bag it arrives in should have a barcode 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 barcodes 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 barcode. 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 barcode 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, like, do all the checks and stuff while 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 that there's no option for them. it forces the operator to basically cut corners. so, i guess from the labs perspective, they have to do a lot of tests, they have to push people quickly. i understand that, but there are ways of making things 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 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 ten. 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 theirfull—timejobs.

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 were joining, 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, we 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...

..of consistently getting results back within 2a hours. they said it's not clear it can justify its... before the pandemic, there was already a network the government says it has... ..which has... newsreader: now, the uk's biggest testing lab has been hit _ by an outbreak of coronavirus. reporter: it's been reported - 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's 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 that same week, the uk reaches one of many miserable milestones. newsreader: 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... ..so they can... ..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 contamination. 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 is just 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. imean... this... that is just disgusting. this is the bit that just, perhaps shocks me 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 in a 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 xs are inconclusive results. this many suggests contamination.

he bangs table 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? in all, i speak to three scientists at length, 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? no is the straight answer to that. if you've got that level of contamination on the plate which shows there's a positive, how do you know the positives are positive? the lab says it doesn't pressure staff and its sample void rate is... ..in the country. it says its... ..providing reassurance its results are... it says there may have been isolated mistakes... ..but that this is inevitable

in a laboratory that... 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 forgivable. the lab says this programme is an... ..representation of its efforts, and that while i was filming, it was... ..due to the second wave. it says it has contributed significantly to the pandemic response. it operates... ..and has been recommended for accreditation by the regulator. the government says it demands the highest standards, takes... ..and...

people in the lab tend to forget that these are real people's 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.

hello there. by the end of this easter weekend, the weather will have changed dramatically to something much colder, but today it hasn't been feeling too bad, particularly where we have had some sunshine. in some spots, it has been a struggle to break up the cloud. that was eastbourne earlier on. you can see from the satellite picture where there was a cloudy start to the day and some of that cloud struggled to break up, but further west and north, we have had the best of the sunshine and the highest of temperatures. we take that zone of clear skies and through the night pushit clear skies and through the night push it further southwards and other those clear skies at night,

temperatures are able to drop, so there will be a touch of frost in some spots even in the centre of some spots even in the centre of some cities, birmingham, for example, down to freezing, some places in the country a little below freezing so a cold start to easter sunday but a dry start for most with high pressure stilljust about in charge, but that big change i talked about at the start will come courtesy of this cold front which will be drifting in from the north. for many places, a fine day, once any mist and fog clears, but northern ireland will cloud over from the north, scotland clouding over, some rain as ourfront from the north, scotland clouding over, some rain as our front gets into northern scotland and behind that cloud, the air starts to turn colder and just at the north of the church there, the splodges of white, wintry showers. that is a sign of things to come. the sunday night and on into easter monday, we push this cold front southwards. behind it, follow the white lines all the way up follow the white lines all the way up to the north, this is a true arctic blast and it is going to feel like it. you can see the deep blue

colour spreading right across the map, a much colder day on monday. even where we see some sunshine, there will be showers. even toward there will be showers. even toward the south, some showers, wintry even to low levels and across high levels in northern scotland we could see 15 centimetres of snow accumulating and blowing around. very strong winds with gusts of 62 may be 70 mph in northern scotland, so factor in the wind, the temperature might say between two and 9 degrees but it will feel more like this. in the centre of aberdeen on monday afternoon, it will feel like minus five degrees and while it will not stay quite that called for the coming week, temperatures will remain below—average. nothing particularly warm on the horizon.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines... new rules for care home visits in england. two people — as well as babies and young children — will be allowed for indoor visits from 12th april. we know that in care homes, we've got... there may be grandparents, there may be great—grandparents who haven't had a chance to see new arrivals to their family during the pandemic and this will be the chance for that to happen. west midlands police say an 85—year—old woman, who died after being attacked by two dogs in her garden, suffered multiple injuries. italy goes into an easter lockdown — as the country struggles with the latest wave of the coronavirus. the uk launches what will be the world's largest ocean monitoring system to protect wildlife and biodiversity.

the mummies of 22 ancient egyptian rulers will be transported through cairo today — crowds are expected to line the streets, to witness the historic procession.