Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what (a) medical evidence his Department has considered on and (b) recent assessment his Department has made of the reliability of (i) nasal and (ii) throat swabs taken for at-home testing kits for covid-19.

All home testing kits go through rigorous external scientific and clinical review process before being put into use.

An increasingly broad range of international peer reviewed evidence demonstrates that self-swabbing for COVID-19 is just as effective as clinician-administered swabbing.