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 the availability of covid-19 rapid lateral flow tests for home delivery.

The UK Health Security Agency has secured hundreds of millions of additional lateral flow device tests, to allow a 200% increase in testing supply prior to the Omicron variant. We have accelerated manufacture and delivery timelines which has doubled the total delivery capacity with Royal Mail to 900,000 test packs and polymerase chain reaction tests per day for home delivery. We have also increased the availability of tests at pharmacies and for local authorities. We plan to distribute over 90 million tests across the United Kingdom per week.