Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will take steps to increase laboratory capacity in the covid-19 antigen testing system.

We have built the largest diagnostic testing industry in British history at pace, from scratch. We are scaling up our testing capacity even further to 500,000 tests a day by the end of October. We are augmenting the existing diagnostic network with additional laboratories and adding capacity this month and throughout the autumn.