Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, for what reasons the 119 covid-19 NHS test and trace service is only able to contact testing labs to enquire about progress on returning covid-19 test results five days after those tests have been taken.

NHS Test and Trace allow sufficient time to identify samples which exceed the median turnaround time and aim to automatically resolve before a complaint is received.

Any referrals are passed on to a dedicated team which specialises in tracking down missing results.