Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the average (a) hold and (b) process time is for orders placed through the national supply disruption response service helpline.

The National Supply Disruption Response (NSDR) was rapidly stood up in March 2020 to respond to supply disruption of personal protective equipment (PPE) as a result of COVID-19. Since then, the NSDR has made over 4,000 emergency deliveries of PPE.

The NSDR operates a 24 hours a day, seven days a week helpline for those in urgent need of PPE and other supplies which they are unable to source through their usual routes. Between 11 and 18 May the average call centre wait time was 1.19 seconds. Over the same period the average case resolution time was 1.97 days.