Coronavirus

Richard Graham Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

We share a common mission in this space, because we have already invested £200 million in expanding diagnostics, and that is an incredibly important part of the reopening of the NHS. I am very happy to meet the hon. Gentleman and his group and all those interested in the expansion not just of radiography but of all types of diagnostics. We need to ensure we do that in a way that works for patients and therefore opens access. That is incredibly important. We are putting in the investment and we are rolling out the programme. It is happening as we speak, and if he has further ideas to throw into that area, I am very happy to listen to them.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State and all involved first for the temporary testing site, and secondly for the permanent testing site now available for the people of Gloucestershire in Gloucester, but the reality is that capacity is much greater than demand and resources are considerable. Does my right hon. Friend therefore agree that we could make the testing capacity available, for example, to teachers with concerns or to members of black, Asian and minority ethnic communities who need reassurance much faster, before symptoms develop. How can we make that happen?

[Matt Hancock]

I am absolutely thrilled to get a question on the problem of having too much testing capacity, as opposed to too little. We have one of the biggest testing capacities in the world. We have built that almost from scratch as a country, and we must use it effectively. We have, for instance, rolled out the extra testing in the NHS that the Chair of the Select Committee was asking about earlier. We have rolled out the weekly testing of staff and the monthly testing of patients in care homes. We will follow a clinical path.

My hon. Friend asked about teachers. We are currently survey testing teachers to find out if they are more at risk than the general population, in the same way that care workers, care home workers and NHS staff are. If they are, we will put asymptomatic testing in place. We are doing exactly the same survey testing for taxi drivers, because taxi drivers are at higher risk than the rest of the country. If he will forgive me, we are taking a scientific approach to how we allocate that capacity, but it is true that one of the policy challenges we face as a Department is making sure we use all the testing capacity, and long may that be so.