Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of the track and trace scheme.

The Government launched NHS Test and Trace on 28 May 2020. This includes enhanced contact tracing which brings together testing, contact tracing and outbreak management into an end-to-end service.

We have recruited 27,000 contact tracing staff in England to support this service. These staff are a mix of call handlers and health professionals. These staff are in addition to existing public health experts from Public Health England (PHE) and local government. PHE staff are not employed exclusively as ‘contact tracers’.

Final agreed contract values of procuring the call handling service will be published in the individual Contract Award Notices in the Official Journal of the European and we publish certain information on Contracts Finder about contracts awarded.