Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will publish (a) the design, (b) methodology, (c) selection and eligibility criteria and (d) early data from the daily testing pilot as of 18 July 2021.

Organisations participating in the workplace daily contact testing pilot were selected because they had expressed an interest in joining the pilot and already had an asymptomatic test site in the workplace. The workplaces selected were also designed to ensure a spread of different types of organisation, including additional public sector organisations, to assess the operational implications of running daily contact testing.

To be eligible to take part in the workplace daily contact testing pilot, people working at the selected workplaces who were identified as a contact of someone with COVID-19 had to:

- have no COVID-19 symptoms;

- give their informed consent to taking part;

- not live with anyone who has COVID-19 or symptoms;

- not live in Scotland or Northern Ireland;

- not travel in or out of Scotland or Northern Ireland while taking part in daily contact testing for work or personal reasons;

- commit to test for at least 5 of the 7 scheduled days.

A document setting out details of the pilot design, including the selection and eligibility criteria, is currently under review prior to publication. The pilot was designed to evaluate the operational feasibility of on-site daily contact testing in workplaces; it was not a research study and did not, therefore, follow a specific methodology. Data from the pilot will not be published as it is not validated.