Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what improvements were made to the NHS Test and Trace contact tracing process from (a) 29 December 2020 to (b) 27 January 2021.

Between 29 December 2020 and 27 January 2021, the contact tracing service implemented numerous service improvements including automatic presentation of cases to agents, recorded voicemail messages, changes to scripting, enhanced tracing performance levels and outcomes on positive lateral flow tests, multi-skill training of agents, roll-out of a new quality assurance framework, and improvements to the CTAS (Contact Tracing and Advice Service Software) system including capturing international phone numbers.

The contact tracing service also introduced RTTS (Real Time Technology Services) at the beginning of the year which allowed for a median reduction time of over 6 hours from the time a case was uploaded into CTAS.