Health and Social Care Update

Lord St John of Bletso Excerpts

Monday 22nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Haskel) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, have both withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord St John of Bletso.

[Lord St John of Bletso (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to probe the Minister outside the question of the vaccine supply and its admirable rollout. While welcoming the Government’s workplace testing scheme, in which lateral flow tests will be given to businesses until the end of June, what established workplace testing infrastructure is in place? What measures are being taken to ensure the high uptake of this strategy and that it is as safe and accurate as possible?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Lord is entirely right to emphasise this incredibly important aspect of our toolkit to manage infection rates down. The workplace is an area of infection threat and asymptomatic testing is a way to keep workplaces safe. We have put in place until the summer the free provision of lateral flow tests for those who wish to do workplace testing, and we are looking at ways in which we could potentially extend that, particularly in circumstances where the infection rate crept up again. We are working very closely with BEIS colleagues to look at the kind of regime that would be necessary. I pay tribute to DfT colleagues who have trail-blazed this area with the test to release programme, which uses private testing capacity for that important transport corridor, and to colleagues at UKAS who have put in place the accreditation necessary to create an independent, private ecology of the kind that the noble Lord refers to.