Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government plans to take to ensure (a) adequate covid-19 surveillance and (b) the UK's ability to respond to future waves of covid-19 in the context of the withdrawal of funding from the Zoe covid symptom checker, the CoMix social contacts survey and the Siren and Vivaldi studies.

The Government will continue monitoring the virus through maintaining scaled back surveillance studies such as the Office for National Statistics’ COVID-19 Infection Survey, SIREN, Vivaldi and other data sources including genomic sequencing. As a result of these developments, the Department and the UK Health Security Agency are no longer in a position to fund the ZOE COVID study and CoMix social contact study. The Government will keep all surveillance activities under review to ensure we have the capabilities to monitor waves of COVID-19 and defend against future variants.