Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the availability of personal protection equipment for charities providing frontline care and support for patients with terminal illnesses.

As demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) hit record levels during the global pandemic, the Government and industry joined forces to build a PPE distribution network from scratch. With the help of the Armed Forces, the NHS Supply Chain now delivers PPE to 58,000 settings including care homes, hospices and community organisations. Since 25 February 2020 the Department has distributed over 3.4 billion PPE items for use by health and social care services in England in this manner.

Additionally, the Government has authorised the release of over 164 million items of PPE to local resilience forums to help them respond to urgent local spikes in need across the adult social care system and some other frontline services, where providers are unable to access PPE through their usual, or dedicated wholesaler routes.