Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of localising contact tracing and giving local authorities control of covid-19 test and trace.

NHS Test and Trace and local authorities already work within a joint framework focussed on preventing, identifying and managing local outbreaks and engage with local communities to support effective testing, contact tracing and self-isolation. Within this framework, local public health teams have more control through community-led testing, expanded local tracing partnerships and the sharing of data, insight and analysis used to identify clusters of new infections and potential local outbreaks.