For sale… the £1.1 BILLION flagship ‘megalab’ set up during Covid to defend Britain against future epidemics – after it has stood empty for 11 months
- The Rosalind Franklin Laboratory is up for sale on property website Rightmove
- The laboratory was part of a project announced in November 2020
It was hailed as Britain’s flagship ‘megalab’, a £1.1 billion cutting-edge diagnostic centre to counter Covid-19 and defend 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.
But three years later, the Rosalind Franklin Laboratory – named in honour of the renowned 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 trying to offload the world-leading facility for a fraction of its cost to taxpayers, who were forced to fund almost twice its initial £588m budget.
Instead of being at the forefront of the fight against Covid, the project opened six months late, faced issues 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’.
The Rosalind Franklin Laboratory – named in honour of the renowned British scientist – stands empty, a monument to waste and incompetence, and up for sale on the property website Rightmove
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
MP Matt Webster stormed: “****… “
Real estate agent Avison Young is touting 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 the Mail on Sunday there is no demand for the 236,231 sq ft site, which was once lauded as the largest testing facility of its kind in Europe.
“I can’t see any private companies taking this on as a whole, only a government would,’ said Jon Curtis, a leading expert in the field of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing of DNA samples.
‘Post-Covid we should have had a low cost, world-leading testing facility. But now it’s all for sale. A legacy of failure and a vast waste of many hundreds of millions of pounds.
‘The UK went into the pandemic with 30 years of world-leading mass industrial PCR experience. It was all wasted.’
The planned sale shatters a promise that the site would help Britain battle future epidemics.
In December 2021, visiting MPs were told the lab ‘could be used for testing different viruses or disease’, including high cholesterol to prevent heart attacks and strokes.
But during the pandemic outbreak, thousands of test samples that were sent to the flagship laboratory were contaminated during processing and deemed invalid.
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