Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to increase S gene regional testing capacity to identify cases of the omicron variant of covid-19.

We have no current plans to do so. Five out of 10 Lighthouse Laboratories currently have S-gene target failure (SGTF) capacity, representing a coverage of approximately 50 to 60% of the network. However, nine out of 10 laboratories have implemented a genotype reflex assay which offers a much greater specificity of detection for Omicron than SGTF. We are working to rapidly expand coverage of the genotyping assay to up to 100% of our Lighthouse Laboratory network.