Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent discussions he has had with local authorities to help ensure a take-up of mass covid-19 testing in low income Tier 3 areas throughout England.

We are working intensively with local authorities to ensure their community testing programmes are appropriately targeted during lockdown to continue to identify more positive cases and break chains of transmission.

The community testing offer is being expanded across all 317 local authorities in England to test people without symptoms. Local authorities are encouraged to target testing at people who are unable to work from home during the national lockdown. We are providing an additional £7 billion for NHS Test and Trace to support increased testing, including community testing and ongoing improvements to contact tracing.