It was hailed as Britain’s flagship ‘megalab’, a £1.1 billion cutting-edge diagnostic centre to counter COVID-19 and protect the country against future epidemics.
Announcing the project in November 2020, then-health secretary Matt Hancock said the laboratory ‘confirms the UK as a world leader in diagnostics’, capable of carrying out 300,000 tests a day.
However, three years later, the Rosalind Franklin Laboratory, named in recognition of the famous British scientist, stands empty, a monument to waste and incompetence, and up for sale on the property website Rightmove.
Industry insiders claim the government is now attempting to offload the world-leading facility for a fraction of its cost to taxpayers, who were forced to finance almost twice its initial £588 budget.
Instead of being at the forefront of the fight against COVID, the project opened six months late, encountered problems with equipment, staff and construction and typically processed only 11,500 tests a day before closing 18 months later.
Desperate estate agents are now offering packages that will see the custom-built facilities at Leamington Spa in Warwickshire broken up to attract ‘start-ups, scale-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises’.
MP Matt Webster stormed that he was told last summer that irrespective of COVID they would be utilising the facility.
“They said for other diagnostic purposes, for cancer, cardiovascular and metabolic disease.
“UKHSA said the UK needed that facility.
“Now they are abandoning it – why? What are they proposing as an alternative?
“So many jobs have been lost
“I was originally told the cost was £1.1bn, they’ve now said half of that which I find hard to believe.
“I asked honest questions in the chamber but no one would tell me what the cost was.”
Real estate agent Avison Young is trumpeting the sale as an ‘unmissable opportunity’, but casual browsers on the property website may be confused by features including ‘facial recognition access’ and ‘dirty and clean’ corridors.
Experts have told a newspaper outlet that there’s no demand for the 236,231 sq ft site, which was once lauded as the largest testing facility of its kind in Europe.
Jon Curtis, a leading expert in the field of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing DNA samples that he couldn’t see any private companies taking this on as a whole, only a government would.
He said post-COVID they should have had a low-cost, world-leading testing facility, but now it’s for sale. A legacy of failure and a vast waste of many hundreds of millions of pounds.
It’s outrageous how our government waste our money while squeezing the highest-ever taxes from us.
However, it does look like the ideal place to house all those migrants they’re letting into our country, and look, it’s already owned by the government, yet they’re too stupid in Whitehall to make use of it.
When will those who squandered billions of our hard-earned taxpayer money be properly held to account? They should be dragged into a court of law, this includes the experts who lied to us, created false models to intimidate us and wallowed in the limelight, making enormous amounts of money while destroying the lives of many and our economy for years to come.
Journalists used to investigate to get the facts, but now they just bow to their masters, never publishing the truth. Newspapers installed fear into a nation and then coerced the public to have vaccines they said were safe. Labelling those who did their research as anti-vaxers and tin foil hate wearers when they were attempting to conceal the truth.
It’s surprising how gullible the public can be, but gradually the truth is being exposed regarding COVID-19, and vaccines, and it’s been fabricated as a slow release to eventually get the public to rise up against the establishment. You only have to look at the latest bait articles on the new conflict to see how newspapers help to create division, hatred and eventual confrontation.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 