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 the covid-19 wastewater testing programme in England on monitoring the rate of infection.

Wastewater monitoring for COVID-19 and its variants was stood down in April 2022 in response to the Government policy change to Living with COVID-19. Therefore, in England, there has been no wastewater testing for COVID-19 within the last 12 months.

Wastewater sampling, and subsequent analysis, has the benefit of detecting the virus regardless of whether people have symptoms or whether they are tested.

Environmental factors such as rainfall dilution can influence the detection of variants in wastewater. Therefore, low total detections on some days may not be reflective of low community infection levels.

Wastewater monitoring cannot currently estimate the number of cases associated with a detection with a high degree of confidence. For example, in small catchment areas it is possible, but highly unlikely, that a detection is due to a single individual. In larger catchment areas detections are likely to be related to a higher number of cases in the population.