Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps he is taking to ensure local authorities have adequate personal protective equipment to respond effectively to the covid-19 outbreak.

My Department is working tirelessly to support DHSC and local partners within Local Resilience Forums (LRF) to help them respond to urgent local spikes in need across the adult social care system and other frontline services, where providers are unable to access PPE through their usual, or dedicated wholesaler routes.

This includes relevant local authority frontline workers, such as adult social care, children’s social care and funeral services, in line with published clinical guidance.

Since 6 April, over 50 million items of PPE have been authorised for release to LRFs across the country. We will continue to make drops of PPE to LRFs identified as being in the highest need of resupply until the new e-commerce solution is operational.