Education: Return in January

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I am sure that I am not alone in hoping that when the Secretary of State next replies to questions from the shadow Education Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), he drops the rather patronising tone he took.

The Secretary of State has asked all university students to test themselves before returning to campus, which is very welcome, especially in Nottingham, where we are very proud to be home to 60,000 university students. I know that those students will want to do the right thing to protect themselves, their housemates, university staff and the wider community, but with a national shortages of tests, can he explain how he will guarantee that they are able to do that right thing and test before they come back to Nottingham?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Nottingham has much to be proud of: not only its students getting themselves vaccinated—over 90% of university students have now taken the vaccine, and I thank them for doing so—but being home to the largest manufacturer of lateral flow tests in Europe, which the Prime Minister spoke about earlier.

One of the ways in which we have mitigated and made sure that we deliver more lateral flow devices is by trebling the number. We used to deliver about 300,000 a day: we have increased the delivery infrastructure so that we can do 900,000 lateral flow devices a day. I recommend that people refresh the website so that they can order their devices. On supply, we have gone from 100 million to 300 million a month. As the Prime Minister mentioned, we probably have the largest testing infrastructure in Europe.