Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he is taking steps to enable care homes to access supplies of centrally purchased personal protective equipment; and if he will make statement.

We are doing everything we can to ensure the social care sector has the support it needs during this unprecedented global outbreak. To date, we have released over 172 million items of personal protective equipment (PPE) to designated wholesalers for onward sale to social care providers. As a result, the majority of PPE continues to be sourced by care providers themselves from wholesalers, as it was prior to COVID-19.