Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to help reduce the time taken for close contacts' details to be obtained by email from people who have tested positive for covid-19 through the test and trace system.

Once entered into the contact tracing system, positive cases are asked to provide details of their close recent contacts via an online form. Between 14 to 20 January, 42.9% of positive cases responded in this way.

If this process is not completed within eight hours, the case is handed over to a clinical case worker who will attempt to make contact by telephone and will call up to ten times over the next 24-hour period. After 24 hours have elapsed, the case will then be passed on to the relevant local authority for follow up, where a local tracing partnership is in place.