The swine flu call centres where staff have nothing to do but play cards and Trivial Pursuit...

Two swine flu call centres are to close just weeks after opening because staff have been spending most of their time playing cards and board games.Hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money has been 'squandered' after around 1,200 workers were employed to deal with the expected deluge of anxious calls.But staff said far fewer calls were made than predicted and supervisors allowed them to play cards and games such as Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly to help pass the long hours between calls.One said that for most of the four weeks he was working at the NHS centre in Farnborough, Hampshire, each staff member took on average just two five-minute calls per eight-hour shift.He said:"The whole thing has been a fiasco. It seems to have been a complete knee-jerk reaction, set up with no real thought.'I can understand the Government had to prepare for the worst, but this was just ludicrous.'They could have put these two centres into one about a quarter of the size, and still had scores of spare lines in case things got really bad. They've squandered a vast amount of public money needlessly"....

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