Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what progress they have made towards ensuring the secure supply of (1) vaccines, and (2) personal protective equipment.

The UK was the first country in the world to start a vaccination programme using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, followed by the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine.

We have signed deals for substantial future supply of both vaccines to replenish our stocks and to enable swift vaccination across the UK in the months ahead. Our supply and scheduled deliveries of these vaccines will fully support vaccination of priority cohorts 1 to 4, as advised by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, by the middle of February.

The Government has also been working tirelessly to deliver personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect our frontline workers throughout the pandemic. We have significantly strengthened and diversified our supply chains for PPE, looking to new suppliers abroad as well as boosting our domestic manufacturing capability. This has helped to build our resilience into the future. We have ordered almost 32 billion items of PPE (of which the majority has been delivered or is on its way) to provide a continuous supply to the frontline over the coming months. As of December 2020, the Government had built a four-month stockpile of all COVID-critical PPE, with a tremendous contribution from UK manufacturers.