Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment the Government has made of the potential merits of introducing health passports as part of its (a) economic recovery strategy and (b) pre-second covid-19 wave contingency planning.

We first need to improve our understanding of the science around immunity in order to fully understand the potential of certification to facilitate a return to the ‘new normal’ and as part of pre-second COVID-19 wave contingency planning.

In order to gain answers to critical questions, the United Kingdom Government is conducting some of the biggest seroprevalence surveys in the world. This includes using lab-based tests to monitor the number of people that are presenting an antibody response and how this response changes over time. The UK Government is also closely monitoring the results from clinical trials of candidate COVID-19 vaccines to determine their efficacy and the immune response they generate.