The free app helping businesses comply with contact tracing as pubs and community hubs reopen

Businesses say they have faced the tricky process of gathering and storing potentially sensitive data without adequate government support, writes Hazel Sheffield

A socially-distanced meet up in the garden of Settle theatre in North Yorkshire, where the community hub is using Twine to track attendance at events (Jo Rhodes)

When Boris Johnson announced that pubs could reopen on 4 July, The Winterbourne community pub in Wiltshire scrambled to change its messaging. It had been preparing to reopen the garden in July, in addition to the takeaway pints and meals on wheels it had been running during lockdown. Then days after a local newsletter went out on 20 June welcoming people back to the pub garden, Boris Johnson announced that pubs and restaurants could host people indoors from 4 July – just as long as they were able to collect details from customers to allow the NHS to test and trace any outbreaks of the virus.

In his announcement, Johnson said the government would “work with the sector to make this manageable”. But businesses say they have instead faced the tricky process of gathering and storing potentially sensitive data alone – while customers fear they are giving their details away with no information on how it will be stored or used.

“When the government said on the 23 July that we could do eat-in as well, all of our planning went out the window,” Emie Hawkshaw, landlady at The Winterbourne, says. “We put in a one-way system for people, then made the accessible toilet the only one available so people aren’t squeezing past one another in the ladies and gents – otherwise you have three to clean down – and then we had to decide what to do with contact tracing.”

For that first opening weekend Hawkshaw kept notes on paper. “We’re quite fortunate that we’re a small community and I know pretty much everyone that comes in. If I didn’t have a contact number, I knew someone who would,” she says.

But she knew it wasn’t sustainable, so the committee that runs the pub started looking for an alternative. They came across Twine, an app developed by Power to Change, a National Lottery-funded organisation that supports community businesses. When Twine was conceived of in 2016, it was meant to support community-minded businesses track footfall and hours from visitors and volunteer staff, to help them prove outcomes to funders and other stakeholders. The developers that had built Twine had purposefully made it customisable, so that it could be adapted for other uses. When it emerged that community businesses needed support with contact tracing, the app was able to switch to this new job.

“Track and trace was talked about for a long time, but it came about quite quickly,” says Jake Moffat, project manager at Power to Change. “We heard some stories where community businesses had invested quite a lot of time and money into bespoke or off-the-shelf services and we said that was ridiculous – we have something that is already GDPR-compliant.”

Privacy groups have spoken out about the onerous nature of collecting contact details from customers. It comes at a time when many businesses are already dealing with uncertainty from four months of reduced income and the burden of other restrictions around social distancing, safety equipment and extra sanitation measures.

Silkie Carlo, the director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group, told the Guardian in June that forcing businesses to collect and store customer information is “an excessive and intrusive move designed to paper over the cracks of a much bigger contact tracing failure”. “It also poses privacy risks,” Carlo said. “Asking pubs and restaurants to become data controllers overnight is unfair – and could see personal data hoarded, lost or misused – whether for marketing or unwanted personal contact. We’ll be monitoring to ensure the scheme is voluntary, safe and respects privacy.”

Twine offers community businesses, charities and mission-based organisations a free and GDPR-compliant method of collecting and storing visitor data. When the customer first visits, they enter their details. The next time, they can use a QR code to scan themselves in, speeding up the process. It’s a huge improvement from the cobbled-together systems that some hospitality businesses have been relying on, using a combination of in-house ordering systems, table reservations and notes taken by staff to collate addresses and numbers of customers.

In Settle, North Yorkshire, Jo Rhodes says that Twine has been making it easier and safer for the Settle Community and Business Hub to start opening its doors again at a time when government guidance is “incomprehensible”. “We have not been told anything about contact tracing, so it feels like there are a lot of bucks passing,” she says. “But if we do have to start doing contact tracing we have this system in place to do it.”

The Hub first started using Twine to keep track of attendee numbers at its community and business projects – a job which used to take the two paid members of staff hours of recording numbers on paper, writing them into spreadsheets and then extracting the right data. But at a recent event in the garden of the local Theatre, Rhodes says they used Twine to collect people’s details as they arrived. “If one of them does come down with something we can say, you were here at 10, so these are the people we need to contact. It’s an extra check and helps us look after our visitors.”

Professional contact tracing improves confidence among customers – one of the important factors in helping hospitality and social businesses recover from lockdown. “Some people still don’t want to come out, so we have set up Twine to have an online attendee group so people can join us online, and we know who is attending online and who is there in person,” Rhodes says.

Hawkshaw says the fact the Twine app is free enables The Winterbourne to comply with contact tracing rules without compromising their bottom line. “A lot of the other services we looked at were free up to a certain amount and then it’s at a certain rate. It’s one of those things where you work out you have to cover x-amount more to cover the cost of something the government has mandated us to do.”

As trading income has dried up, community businesses have relied more heavily on grant funding, according to research from Power to Change. “By and large trading income has not come back to anywhere near the level it was,” Moffat says. “It’s potentially a tough time for the sector, with many businesses rebudgeting and finding new ways to generate that income. A service like this can help a few more of them reopen.”