Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to encourage industries to switch production to personal protection equipment for (a) the NHS and (b) social care providers.
The Government’s personal protection equipment (PPE) plan was published on 10 April and can be found at the following link:
As Strand 3 details, we have set up a cross-Government PPE sourcing unit to secure new supply lines from across the world and a call to industry has been issued to companies at home to manufacture and supply additional PPE at scale.
There has been limited United Kingdom manufacture of PPE to date and so new supply channels for materials to make PPE have been sourced at pace in order to enable new manufacturing to commence.