The Liverpool coronavirus testing pilot failed to reach the city’s poorest residents, raising questions about the scheme’s effectiveness, leaked documents have revealed.

Half a million people were offered tests in November, including a new form of rapid lateral flow testing, carried out by NHS staff and the army.

It was the first city-wide scheme of its kind and a dry-run for Boris Johnson’s “Operation Moonshot” – a billion-pound plan to provide regular, nationwide COVID-19 testing.

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A “Lessons Learned” report by Liverpool City Council, obtained by Sky News, admitted that take-up of the new rapid lateral flow tests, which give results in 20 minutes, was almost twice as high in the richest areas of Liverpool compared to the poorest.

Take-up of traditional PCR swab testing had even “bigger and more consistent inequalities”, the report said, although it did not give precise details.

Barriers to both coronavirus tests included poverty, a lack of digital skills, misinformation and a mistrust of the government.

The news has intensified the debate about the merits of the multi-billion-pound mass testing programme, which is being rolled out at speed across the country before a full scientific evaluation has been completed.

Sky News understands that the initial results from the study of the pilot, which is being conducted by University of Liverpool academics, were only presented to SAGE yesterday. A source familiar with the research said that the final report could be weeks away.

“It’s scandalous,” said Allyson Pollock, director of the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University.

“They’re putting in place an intervention that hasn’t been evaluated, will possibly do more harm and will cost a lot of money.”

The council document, which dates from 2 December, is the first official confirmation that poorer parts of Liverpool were not being reached by the pilot, which the report says tested 170,767 residents, finding 3,046 positive results.

Media reports had claimed that as few as 4% of residents in poorer areas were coming forward, but the government said that it was too early to say for sure if that was the case.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock later claimed that mass testing in Liverpool had produced a “remarkable decline” in cases, although there is limited evidence to suggest that is the case.

The report said that many people were put off being tested by “fear” about the “impact of a positive result.”

People with children felt they might be unable to isolate, the report said, as did workers not covered by Statutory Sick Pay.

Experts said this finding raised questions about whether the testing programme, which focuses on people without symptoms, would do more than reassure the worried well.

“We know from experience that the people who come for screening tests are affluent people who want to be reassured by a negative test,” said Angela Raffle, a consultant to the UK National Screening Programmes. “It’s not a good way of breaking chains of transmission.”

Alongside poverty, the key barrier to getting tested identified by the report was lack of digital skills or access to digital technology.

“What happens if a person doesn’t have a smartphone or email address?” the report asked, adding that the hardest to reach individuals for lateral flow testing were “young, male, deprived and digitally excluded”.

Another nagging issue, the report said, was “poor trust in national government”.

Although awareness of the programme was high, its purpose was “not well understood” and there was “confusion about details” and “suspicion about what is going on and why”.

Lack of faith in the Test and Trace system was a problem, the report found, with people saying there was “no point if nobody can be traced, or nobody follows advice”.

The drive to get people tested was also undermined by misinformation.

Wariness about testing was “fuelled by rumours of false positives in previous testing operations”, which the council warned could “feed conspiracy theories”.

The government has not released a full scientific study on the pilot, but it has confirmed that the lateral flow swab tests were only half as accurate as PCR lab tests, raising concerns about its accuracy, especially for screening visitors to places such as care homes.

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Documents released today by SAGE show that Liverpool Health Protection Board decided to stop using the lateral flow tests to enable visitors to see relatives in care homes, as was previously planned, because of worries about accuracy.

A report by the Health Protection Board in the city suggested that the test’s sensitivity (its ability to avoid missing people with the virus) was between 33.7% and 64.3%, much lower than PCR tests.

On Thursday, Matt Hancock announced that mass testing, using both PCR and lateral flow tests, would be rolled out to secondary school children in the worst-affected areas of London, Kent and Essex.

It follows the news that 67 local areas in England would be given the rapid lateral flow tests for use in mass testing programmes.

The Department for Health and Social Care did not respond to a request for comment.

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