Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how the Government will assess whether the steps being taken are delaying the spread of covid-19 in the absence of full testing.

Since February, the Government has had a sophisticated surveillance programme in place to test for COVID-19.

In addition to having expanded testing more generally, and continuing to do so, Public Health England specifically tests a sample of the population in order to assess the level of virus circulating in the community.

This helps us to understand what proportion of the population is affected at a given time and is used by modellers to estimate where we are in the pandemic and to assess the impact of the steps that have been taken.