Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to enable care workers providing services in supported living facilities for disabled people to get themselves regularly tested for covid-19.

We have begun to roll out an initial round of testing in extra care and supported living settings which meet certain risk-based criteria. These settings must be a closed community with substantial facilities shared between multiple people and most residents receive personal care (rather than help with cooking, cleaning and shopping).

We have been piloting testing initially with Bromley, Hertfordshire and Sheffield, and we are now looking to roll out testing nationally in these settings.

As with care homes, we will use the data from the initial testing rounds to inform our retesting approach and take forward any lessons learnt from the pilots.

Our testing policy is based on clinical advice on relative priorities and available testing capacity and our testing policies continue to be reviewed on an ongoing basis.