Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when adequate covid-19 testing capacity will be available to allow all St Albans residents with symptoms to get tested within a reasonable distance of their home.

We have rapidly built the country’s largest network of diagnostic testing in history and are actively working to build this further to increase capacity to 500,000 tests per day by the end of October. The vast majority of people who use our testing service get a test that is close to home the median distance travelled for an in-person test decreased to 2.9 miles from 3.2 miles in the previous week. We have established a regional testing site at Tesco Plus in Welwyn Garden City and two local testing sites in Luton at Hockwell Ring Community Centre and Bury Park Community Centre.