Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to his Department's policy paper, Personal protective equipment (PPE) strategy: stabilise and build resilience, published on 29 September 2020, what assessment he has made of whether the four months' stockpile of PPE during winter 2020-21 is adequate to protect healthcare workers.

Since February 2020 we have ordered almost 32 billion items of personal protective equipment (PPE), the majority of which has already been delivered or is on its way and by December we had built a four-month stockpile of all COVID-critical PPE.

We are confident we have secured enough PPE for the ongoing challenges of COVID-19 and that we have the processes and logistics in place to distribute PPE to where it is needed.