Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, on what dates his Department approached businesses to produce more ventilators for the NHS between 1 December 2019 and 24 March 2020.

Work preparing the National Health Service has been ongoing and we have already doubled ventilator capacity. New and existing suppliers are being asked to build as many as they can. The Prime Minister has issued a call to United Kingdom industry to produce additional ventilators and the Department asked appropriate potential manufacturers on Friday 13 March to come forward with proposals for ramping up the production of existing designs or new ventilation machines.

Nearly 4,000 companies have responded and around a dozen potential prototypes have now been presented to the Department which we are currently pursuing.