Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what initial estimate they have made of the cost of plans to introduce same day mass testing for COVID-19 in England.

An evaluation of testing the whole of Liverpool will inform the potential rollout of whole town or city testing to other areas, as part of the Government’s commitment to make mass testing available. Same day testing will involve several different types of technology including lateral flow devices.

A £500 million investment will accelerate the next generation of technologies to support our existing systems and better understand how mass testing could be used.

Our top priorities for testing, as they have been throughout the pandemic, are to allocate testing where it is needed most to save lives, protect the most vulnerable, and enable vital health and care services to operate safely.

In the future, in addition to our existing priorities, we will aim to use new testing technologies to test a higher proportion of the population over time, targeted at where it will have the most impact, and use testing to support the economy and wider society to return to a normal way of life.