Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what (a) policies and (b) grant and funding programmes his Department has introduced to provide support to individuals and organisations in response to the covid-19 outbreak; and what funding has been allocated to each of those programmes in the 2020-21 financial year.

As part of the 2020 Spending Review, HM Treasury announced that for 2020-21 agreed funding includes; £52 billion for frontline health services to tackle the pandemic including £22 billion for the Test and Trace programme; over £15 billion for the procurement of personal protective equipment; and £2.7 billion to support the development and procurement of vaccines. This also included £3 billion for a package of additional capacity initiatives to support the National Health Service through the winter, including keeping the Nightingale hospitals capacity available, accessing increased capacity from independent sector providers and supporting increased safe discharge of patients from NHS hospitals.

Additionally, we have implemented a temporary NHS finance regime for the first half of the year that ensured every penny spent in NHS systems was fully reimbursed and provided approximately £2.7 billion extra funding to cover the second half of this financial year, to support NHS organisations to manage ongoing COVID-19 pressures and resume routine activity. We have provided up to £1.46 billion for infection control and other grants, funding predominantly given to local authorities to help cover the costs of implementing measures to reduce transmission. This was first introduced in May 2020 and was then extended to March 2021.