Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to support the production of ventilators.

At the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in March there were more than 8,000 mechanical ventilators in hospitals across the United Kingdom. Today, we have around 11,900 mechanical ventilators available to National Health Service patients. As of 6 May, 344 of these have been provided by new UK suppliers responding to the Prime Minister’s ventilator challenge and 118 by established UK suppliers.

This figure will continue to rise as we procure further equipment and more products from the Prime Minister’s ventilator challenge become available.