Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the availability of the chemical reagents required for covid-19 testing.

The National Health Service and Public Health England’s capacity is predominantly comprised of ‘closed’ platforms, which use proprietary reagents, and the demand for proprietary test kits is significantly greater than global supply leading to world-wide shortages in the United Kingdom and other countries. We have addressed these challenges by increasing global allocation from suppliers, increasing use of open platforms and increasing use of low throughput ‘desk top’ polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machines. Through this work we now have test kits for over 100,000 tests a day and are continuing to work with industry and other partners to increase the availability of COVID-19 test kits.