Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what information his Department holds on the average price of each protective mask sold to social care providers from private suppliers for the last month for which that data is available.

We are working around the clock to give the social care sector and wider National Health Servicehe equipment and support they need to tackle this outbreak. We continue to supply personal protective equipment (PPE) to selected wholesalers to support social care. Additionally, we deliver PPE to all Local Resilience Forums to allow them to respond to urgent local spikes in need across the adult social care system. The National Supply Disruption Response operates a 24-hour helpline that can also respond to emergency PPE requests. Finally, we are rolling out a PPE Portal to help primary and social care providers to order critical PPE.

Where we sell product to wholesalers we ask that they work within their existing margins. In the recent examples where there has been a significant increase in the cost of the product we have asked all wholesalers not to apply a percentage margin on these PPE items at the moment, but instead to apply the margin value they would have applied under the previous business as usual cost of the product.

Information on average prices is commercially sensitive and cannot be published.