Dante Labs and Immensa Health Clinic: Contracts

(asked on 19th October 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government why Immensa Health Clinics Ltd and Dante Labs have not received full UKAS accreditation to perform COVID-19 testing; whether Immensa Health Clinics Ltd and Dante Labs have received £170 million in public contracts since May last year; and if so, why public contracts were awarded to these unaccredited companies.


Answered by
Lord Kamall Portrait
Lord Kamall
This question was answered on 15th November 2021

Dante Labs is the sister company of Immensa Health Clinics Ltd. Dante Labs have not been awarded Government contracts, they are a private testing provider providing COVID-19 testing directly to private consumers. By law, all COVID-19 tests must meet certain minimum standards set by the Government. Private providers must also complete a declaration stating that their tests meet these standards. The providers listed on GOV.UK may be at various stages of the accreditation process. They may not have full accreditation. However, they will have shown compliance with the required minimum standards as they progress through the process.

We allow private providers to provide testing services ahead of achieving accreditation because achieving accreditation typically takes between six to nine months and requiring providers to achieve this before operating would create a gap in provision of approximately six months. Our mitigation against this being used as a loophole was the addition of an earlier assessment through stage two along with the end-to-end provider being assessed against the Government’s minimum standards.

Immensa Health Clinics Ltd have been awarded contracts worth up to £176 million by the Department. Laboratory contracts were awarded to labs, that are compliant with the requirement to either be accredited to ISO 15189 by UKAS or to be working towards completion of this process. All laboratories were required to complete a rigorous operational, quality and technical readiness process prior to providing testing capacity to NHS Test and Trace. An independent team of clinical scientists working with Test and Trace audited the Immensa Health Clinics Ltd laboratory in Wolverhampton and reviewed their documents, including the clinical sensitivity and specificity of their testing workflow by demonstrating they match with known positive and negative samples. Immensa Health Clinics Ltd demonstrated it had met all these requirements and the laboratory was asked to register with UKAS to undertake a laboratory accreditation scheme and provide evidence of this. Laboratories can continue to operate whilst going through the accreditation process.

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