Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate his Department has made of the average length of time required to upgrade covid-19 testing labs which do not have S gene target failure capabilities.

No specific estimate has been made. Five of the 10 Lighthouse Laboratories are able to report SGTF from their primary polymerase chain reaction assay as an indicator for the Omicron variant. This represents approximately 57% of the current network capacity. It is not practical to convert the remaining laboratories to these primary assays. However, an alternative rapid method for detection of the Omicron variant, a genotyping assay, has been implemented in all 10 laboratories.