Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the waiting time is for covid-19 tests in (a) care homes and (b) hospitals in England as of 2 November 2020.

Information is not available on the average waiting time to receive COVID-19 tests. However, we record and publish data on COVID-19 test result waiting times. As of 28 October, care home testing turnaround times have halved and are currently at a median average of 45 hours. In hospitals, between 22 October and 28 October, 86.1% of pillar 1 test results were made available within 24 hours. This has remained broadly consistent since Test and Trace began.

We have also continued to work to improve testing capacity, which has already seen capacity increase to more than 500,000 on 31 October. We are able to deliver more than 130,000 tests a day to care homes across the country, prioritising high priority outbreak areas. We have also encouraged care homes to conduct testing at weekends in order to improve turnaround times by spreading the flow of tests arriving at labs over the full seven days of the week.