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 reduce the time taken to publish the covid dashboard with new data.

The United Kingdom Coronavirus Dashboard is updated with new data at 4pm daily, including weekends and Bank Holidays. Information is collated from all four nations separately and published on the same day that the data are available. UK metrics can only be shown when there are data available for each nation. Testing data are available for the devolved administrations Monday to Friday.

Cases, deaths and vaccinations data are updated for England, Scotland and Northern Ireland seven days a week, while Wales do not publish data on Saturdays. The published data typically covers events occurring up to either the current or previous day. Data on hospitalisations and patients in mechanical ventilation beds are published every week day for all four nations. Scotland typically publish hospital admission numbers with a lag of four to five days and this means the UK total has the same lag.

In England, hospital trust level data is released every Thursday containing admissions data up to the end of the previous Sunday.