Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what procurement process was followed in order to procure and develop the contact tracing application.

We engaged with a number of companies and methodologies.

Pivotal quickly proved their suitability, and given the extreme urgency, we made a direct award as permitted under Regulation 32 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015.

Pivotal were recommended to us as a company who were on an existing framework, and who had experience of working with Government. Over two days, we looked across a network of suppliers who had existing contracts with the Government and had done work with the National Cyber Security Centre or other security agencies, and so could be relied on to provide highly secure and privacy-focused products.