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 speed up genome sequencing to meet the demands of covid-19 testing.

Each and every process step in the journey from polymerase chain reaction test to actionable insight has been examined for opportunities to improve speed and efficiency. This work has already halved the end-to-end process time since the start of 2021. The Department’s operational improvement team is seeking out opportunities for continuous improvement to further reduce process cycle times. As well as improving existing operations, we have committed to continuous innovation and are pioneering new technologies and data analytics in diagnostic testing and genomic science to deliver step change in speed to insight and public health action. These include highly-automated, high-speed sequencing operations, genotyping assays and high-speed data analytical pipelines for faster detection of variants of concern.