Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government why they decided to create a new centralised team of human contact tracers for COVID-19 rather than local teams under the management of local public health directors, as were used during previous epidemics.

The Government launched its new NHS Test and Trace service on 28 May 2020. This includes enhanced contact tracing.

Public Health England’s local health protection teams and local authority public health teams remain an integral part of the contact tracing system. These teams will be supported by around 25,000 additional contact tracers, a mix of call handlers and health professionals to provide an enhanced, larger scale service to reduce the rate of transmission as lockdown measures start to be eased.

To support the rollout of Test and Trace, all councils have been asked to produce dedicated Local Outbreak Plans by the end of June. £300 million new dedicated funding has been provided to councils to support this.