Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he has taken steps to help ensure that laboratories conducting covid-19 testing are able to maintain the same rate of tests over the Christmas 2021 period.

The National Health Service and the UK Health Security Agency have built a United Kingdom-wide laboratory network with capacity to process 618,000 polymerase chain reaction tests per day. In light of the spread of the Omicron variant, we are increasing this capacity by up to 200,000 tests per day. We expect some of this capacity to be available before Christmas. We have also transitioned to the new Omicron mutation target assay in seven out of 10 laboratories, providing three to four times increased capacity and detection.