Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their policy on strengthening UK national resilience against infectious diseases.

The Department, NHS England and Public Health England have a range of plans and systems in place to detect and respond to any future outbreak of an infectious disease, including:

- well-developed epidemic intelligence to identify new health threats (animal and human);

- surveillance systems to identify and track United Kingdom and/or overseas outbreaks and assess the risk to the UK;

- compliance with the World Health Organization International Health Regulations in relation to identifying, communicating and responding to national and international health threats;

- the diagnostic capability to identify organisms and ability to develop new diagnostics that can be quickly rolled out to the National Health Service;

- the production of advice for clinicians, including diagnostic and patient management algorithms;

- a legal framework that allows for the investigation and control of infectious disease;

- the UK Public Health Rapid Support Team, which can deploy overseas to support the local response to outbreaks at source before they pose a risk to UK travellers or UK population; and

- public information, messaging and advice on infectious diseases.

Comprehensive national immunisation programmes are also in place to tackle vaccine-preventable diseases, which are kept under review by the independent expert Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.

The UK Government assesses the risk of an infectious diseases outbreak to the UK every two years. This is published in an unclassified form as the National Risk Register.