Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department has to ensure that staff working in children’s (a) social care services and (b) charities have adequate access to (i) personal protective equipment and (ii) testing for covid-19.

Everybody working on the front line deserves to have the equipment they need to do their job safely and the entire Government is working day and night to make that happen.

To 9 August, we have authorised the release of over 157 million items of personal protective equipment (PPE) to Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) to help them respond to urgent local spikes in need.

These multi-agency LRF partnerships are made up of representatives from local public services, including the emergency services, local authorities, the National Health Service, the Environment Agency and others. This PPE is intended to help LRFs respond to urgent local spikes in need across the adult social care system and other front-line services, where providers are unable to access PPE through their usual routes. This includes children’s homes, secure children’s homes, residential special schools and children’s social care services in local authorities.

We have brought together the NHS, industry and the armed forces to create a PPE distribution network, delivering critical PPE supplies to those who need it. Since the publication of the Government’s Testing Strategy in April 2020, we have continued to scale its capacity to support testing for COVID-19 and as at 17 August 2020, testing capacity was 326,086 across all pillars of the testing programme.

Following these further increases in testing capacity, testing is now available to all symptomatic people across the whole of the United Kingdom and anyone experiencing symptoms should get a test as soon as possible. This includes those working to provide essential public services, including children’s social care and charities delivering critical frontline services.