Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to introduce antibody testing for covid-19 for NHS staff.

The Government is scaling up the national effort to boost testing capacity for COVID-19 including increasing polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing of essential workers to see if they have the virus and introducing antibody testing to see if people have had the virus and are now immune.

We are working towards 100,000 tests a day using spare capacity to test critical key workers and completing the pilot of our new commercial swab testing programme. We will complete our evaluation of the antibody test kits and continue our programme to survey the population to learn more about this virus. Finally, we are building a British diagnostics industry.

The Government is currently engaged with several companies and are urgently testing the quality, accuracy and effectiveness of potential antibody tests with scientific experts and regulators. These tests are still being developed and none yet has been proven to work as we would require. No Government in the world has yet rolled out a full COVID-19 antibody testing programme. Should our clinical testing prove successful, we hope to deploy antibody testing kits in their millions.