Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the next steps set out on page 14 of his Department's policy paper of 4 April 2020, Coronavirus (COVID-19): scaling up testing programmes, what progress has been made on implementing those next steps.

Following the publication of the Department’s Testing Strategy, ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19): scaling up testing programmes’, there has been significant progress against the objectives set out as next steps, including achieving delivering 100,000 swab tests per day by the end of April.

The Department has ensured that the National Health Service uses its spare capacity to test its staff and has rolled out a commercial swab testing programme that is now testing hundreds of thousands of people a day.

We have now delivered over 2.3 million antibody tests to NHS staff and patients and continue to evaluate lateral flow style antibody tests for home use should that be appropriate.