Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when he plans to extend regular covid-19 testing to all (a) homecare workers working for (i) registered and (ii) unregistered organisations, (b) live-in carers and (c) personal assistant care workers working in adult social care settings.

On 23 November 2020, we began offering Care Quality Commission registered domiciliary care organisations access to regular, weekly COVID-19 testing for their carers looking after people in their own homes.

We will be expanding testing further to all other homecare workers, including live-in carers and personal assistants in a phased roll-out. We will provide further details in due course about how these groups access testing. We will continue to review our social care testing strategy for adult social care in light of the latest evidence and available capacity.