Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will ensure that care home workers and NHS staff are regularly tested for covid-19 even when those people are not displaying symptoms.

We have made testing available to all symptomatic National Health Service staff and social care staff as a priority. We are also testing those in these groups who are asymptomatic in specific circumstances where appropriate.

For NHS workers specifically, NHS England has recently published guidance on when testing of this nature might be appropriate, including where an incident has taken place, an outbreak or where high prevalence has been established. We are now introducing twice weekly testing.

For care home workers, all adult care homes are able to access testing kits, for weekly testing of staff through the care home testing portal. We have the capacity to send out over 120,000 test kits a day to care homes.