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 the (a) accuracy and (b) reliability of covid-19 modelling commissioned by his Department.

Part of the scientific advice provided to inform the United Kingdom’s response to COVID-19 is informed by a number of infectious disease models developed by world-leading academic and public health institutions under the Government’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M). SPI-M members use the latest available data on the COVID-19 epidemic to inform their modelling, and different institutions use different approaches and methodologies to bring together all plausible insights.

The SPI-M group regularly compare and scrutinise the modelling methods used by individual institutions to ensure accuracy and reliability, whilst considering any reasonable uncertainty. The Royal Society’s Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic group of academics have provided further challenge where possible, through rapid reviews of work from SPI-M modellers.