Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has asked for feedback from local authorities on the effectiveness of Public Health England's communication of covid-19 test results; and what steps have been taken to improve those communications as a result of feedback received.

We aim to move towards a testing model which has greater local ownership with local delivery models tailored to local need. This means a relentless focus on quality, access and speed across the programme;?and?building the capacity to enable more?frequent, targeted?testing of?priority groups where this will improve infection control.

We are in daily discussions about how best to deliver data on COVID-19 to local authorities and options to integrate this data into their current health response systems. We are also working on producing a toolkit that will support local authorities in data management. This will be complemented by the recently established Joint Biosecurity Centre. This operates as an independent analytical function that will work with local areas to provide real time analysis and assessment of infection outbreaks at a community level, to enable rapid intervention before outbreaks grow.