Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, for what reason the process accessing covid-19 lateral flow test packs changed from collection from pharmacies to a digitally registered collection code based system; who stores the personal data collected at registration for a test pack collection code; for what purposes that data is collected; and what equality impact assessment his Department conducted on the rollout of a digitally registered collection code based system.

The collect code in pharmacies was introduced in October 2021 to allow greater traceability of tests in the case of a recall. Personal data is collected and stored by the UK Health Security Agency in accordance with its information governance processes. In addition to traceability, this data is used to monitor geographic distribution, assess the performance of the pharmacy collect channel and issue reminders to the collector to register results.

An equality impact assessment was completed prior to launching the collect code. This considered the risks and impact with mitigating actions to allow easy access to tests. For those unable to use or without access to the internet or mobile devices, the option to pre-register for tests via 119 was provided. We also maintained the option of collecting tests without pre-registering.