Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of NHS preparedness for a pandemic.

Ensuring the United Kingdom is prepared for a future pandemic is a top priority for the Government, and the Department continuously reviews and updates our pandemic preparedness to reflect the latest scientific information, lessons learned from exercises, and our response to previous emergencies.

The Department is working with NHS England, the UK Health Security Agency, and its partners across the health and care system to maintain a flexible and scalable set of capabilities which can be adapted to respond to any future threats, across all routes of infectious disease transmission. The Department’s approach to pandemic preparedness also takes into account the underlying resilience of the health and care system.

NHS England is an active participant in this work and has made several improvements that will help resilience in a future pandemic, including on the coordination and escalation of a national healthcare response, high consequence infectious disease and infectious disease capacity, and critical care capacity, surge and transfer plans.