The government's £100m chlamydia testing programme has been "inefficient and wasteful", a select committee report has said.

The "hands-off approach" of the Department of Health (DH) led to duplication of effort amongst primary care trusts and failed to minimise infection, the chairman of the public accounts committee has warned.

A failure to coordinate work such as commissioning means the NHS has wasted money on procurement, and a lack of urgency means money will now have to be spent on treating people who might have avoided infection if the programme had been more effective, today's report states.

Concerns about the increase in cases of chlamydia, the most commonly diagnosed bacterial sexually transmitted infection, led the government to embark on a national screening programme in 2002.

However, testing wasn't compulsory primary care trusts (PCTs) and targets to test 15 per cent of 15-24 year olds were missed. In fact, only five per cent of the target group were tested.

With only five per cent of young people being tested, the Department of Health "belatedly sprang into action" in 2008, said committee chairman Edward Leigh, and introduced a mandatory testing target of 17 per cent for PCTs.

"As the PCTs scrambled to catch up, an already fragmented and inefficient programme became even more inefficient and wasteful," said Leigh.

"This is a classic example of what can happen when the responsibility for delivering a national initiative is pushed down to local level, with little thought about the mechanisms and interventions needed at national and regional level to maintain efficiency and momentum."

Although £100m has been spent on the programme since it started, the select committee reported that the department has little idea of the benefits.

The committee has stated that the government needs to have a national response to what is a national problem, identify the best local strategies, coordinate commissioning, increase testing and measure effectiveness.

A recent National Audit Office (NAO) report calculated that these kinds of improvements could save the programme £40m a year by 2010-11.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said that the programme has "improved dramatically" in the last year, "thanks to the hard work of all those involved". All local trusts now offer screening, compared to a third in 2007, she said.

"An ambitious new programme on this scale takes time to perfect and improve," she added.