Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many local authority areas are trialling the clipper distribution system for personal protective equipment during the covid-19 outbreak.

The personal protective equipment (PPE) Portal has now been rolled out to general practitioners and small social care providers in all local authorities in England, totalling over 21,000 providers and delivering over 22 million items of PPE. Originally, the pilot involved inviting small groups of healthcare providers to register with the portal from the following local resilience forum (LRF) areas:

- Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly;

- Northumbria;

- Nottinghamshire;

- Hertfordshire; and

- Thames Valley.

As the LRFs are based on police areas, the list above does not correspond to local authority boundaries. For example, Northumberland, Newcastle, Gateshead, South Tyneside, North Tyneside and Sunderland local authorities are all within Northumbria LRF.