Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that (a) all care home (i) staff and (ii) residents have access to testing and (b) testing sites are accessible without a car.

All social care staff are now eligible for testing whether symptomatic or asymptomatic. This also applies to care home residents. Patients discharged from hospital into care homes will be tested before discharge as a matter of course. Care home staff can continue to access testing by registering through the self-referral portal for tests at regional test sites or home test kits. We are also ramping up satellite test provision for care homes. Under this model, we distribute test kits to a care facility that has a pressing need and then collect and process the swabs through the COVID-19 National Testing Programme labs.