Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he has taken to tackle the shortages in personal protective equipment raised in the letter to him from the Leader of Birmingham City Council, dated 16 April 2020.

As of 28 May, the Make Cell identified 502 opportunities from companies with the potential to manufacture safe-to-use personal protective equipment to the technical standards, scale and pace required. Of these, 374 are being fully assessed, 77 have been ‘qualified’ and a further 27 now have an approved technical design following prototype development. To date, the Department has raised 13 purchase orders (POs) with nine different companies – covering gowns, aprons, facemasks, visors, and hand sanitizer. These POs are for nearly half-a-billion items of PPE, 12 million square metres of gown fabric and 105 tonnes of raw materials for facemasks. Companies with raised POs have already started the manufacturing process, with some already delivering to National Health Service frontline services. More new manufacturers of PPE are expected to commit to producing PPE in the coming weeks, with 25 opportunist companies in final commercial discussions.