Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many additional ventilators his Department has been able to purchase to date.

The National Health Service has world-renowned critical care facilities which includes access to around 5000 adult and 900 paediatric critical care ventilators, with further ventilators available outside of critical care facilities.

We are currently in the process of purchasing many more ventilators at scale. We are likely to need 20,000 more under a reasonable worst cases scenario and the Prime Minister has issued a call to United Kingdom industry to produce additional ventilators.