Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what (a) discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on and (b) assessment he has made of the potential merits of devolving Public Health covid-19 responsibilities to city-region areas in England.

Local government has a vital role in delivering most of the strands of our plan for controlling the virus and returning to normality including:

- rapidly upscaling community testing and using local knowledge to trace the hardest to reach contacts;

- playing a key role in the deployment of the vaccine; and

- co-ordinating multi-agency outbreak management response including through local resilience forums.