Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department has taken to ensure that care homes have access to adequate supplies of PPE.

It is vital to protect people providing and receiving care in care homes. To address the significant spike in demand for personal protective equipment (PPE), the Government stepped in to support the supply and distribution of PPE to the care sector.

We have made arrangements with 12 designated wholesalers to provide supplies to care providers registered with the Care Quality Commission. As of 21 August, we have released 192 million items of PPE through this route. We have also developed a new online PPE Portal to make it easier to request critical PPE, and all care homes have received an invitation to register on it. We continue to support Local Resilience Forums, having authorised the release of over 164 million items of PPE between 6 April and 27 August to help them respond to urgent local spikes in need across the adult social care system. To further strengthen the resilience of our supply chain, we have mobilised the National Supply Disruption Response system to respond to emergency PPE requests, including for the social care sector.