Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have, if any, to create an online hackathon platform to help design and deploy an open-source ventilator for the NHS.

Work preparing the National Health Service has been ongoing and we have already nearly doubled ventilator capacity. New and existing suppliers are being asked to build as many as they can. The Prime Minister has issued a call to United Kingdom industry to produce additional ventilators and the Department asked appropriate potential manufacturers on 13 March to come forward with proposals for new ventilation machines.

The Department is already considering several prototypes from manufacturers in response and has no plans to establish online platforms as part of the procurement process.