Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to increase the level of testing for (a) NHS and (b) social care frontline staff for covid-19.
The Prime Minister has called on industry to work with the Government to urgently develop a new test to determine whether people have developed immunity. Rapid upscaling will help National Health Service and other critical public sector staff back to work as fast as possible.
With a focus on ensuring the highest priority cases are tested first, officials are working to rapidly increase the number of tests that can be conducted by Public Health England and the NHS in laboratories, with the expected surge in capacity ready within weeks.