Corporate report

PHE and NHS Test and Trace delivery plan, July to September 2021

Updated 18 November 2021

This was published under the 2019 to 2022 Johnson Conservative government

Introduction

This document is a joint Public Health England (PHE) and NHS Test and Trace (NHSTT) plan that outlines how our organisations will support delivery of Step 4 of the roadmap. This follows and supplements Delivery Plan 3, which supported the period of lockdown. This plan will conclude with the launch of the UKHSA on 1 October 2021.

It was produced in summer 2021 as an internal planning document to describe what we are doing, why we are doing it and the commitments we are making because of this. It will be owned and delivered by the relevant members of the Executive Committees of NHSTT and PHE. This version has been prepared for external publication, as the final document in the series of business plans produced by NHS Test & Trace since its creation in summer 2020.

 In February 2021 the government published the document ‘COVID-19 Response – Spring 2021’, which sets out the roadmap out of lockdown in England (‘the roadmap’). This presented a 4-step process by which the country could re-open schools, re-establish social contact, re-open business and allow people to travel and to attend public and private events.

On 14 June, the Prime Minister announced a 4 week pause at Step 3, as a result of the additional risk and uncertainty caused by the spread of the more transmissible Delta variant. On 5 July, the government published ‘COVID-19 Response: Summer 2021’, which set out its plans for moving to Step 4 of the roadmap, subject to a successful assessment of 4 criteria. On 12 July the government confirmed the roadmap was on schedule and could proceed to Step 4 on 19 July.

The government has set out the details of the final step of the roadmap and 5 principles for managing COVID-19 as we learn to live with the virus. These are to:

• reinforce the country’s vaccine wall of defence through booster jabs in the autumn and driving take up;
• enable the public to make informed decisions through guidance, rather than laws
• retain proportionate test, trace and isolate plans in line with international comparators
• manage risks at the border and support a global response to reduce the risk of variants emerging globally and entering the UK
• retain contingency measures to respond to unexpected events, while acknowledging that further cases, hospitalisations and deaths will occur as the country learns to live with COVID-19

Our aim is to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on those most likely to be seriously affected. Therefore test, trace and self-isolation remain critical interventions to control the spread of infection and to protect society as the country re-opens.

The significant risk of new variants being introduced is greatest at our borders. We will support cross-departmental action and align efforts to test and trace travellers with other border measures. We will also continue to identify and research new variants through our intensive programme of genomic sequencing.

The immense success of the vaccination programme means that the likelihood of infection leading to serious illness, hospitalisation and death has been significantly reduced for vaccinated adults. By 31 August 2021, over 90 million COVID-19 vaccinations have been delivered. Data also indicates that 143,600 hospitalisations (up to 22 August), 112,300 deaths and 24,702,000 infections (up to 27 August) had been prevented as a result of the vaccination programme.

As the country re-opens there is a clear need to ensure that risk is minimised and the public continue to act with caution. Test, Trace and Isolate services will continue to play a critical role in reducing risk while ensuring interventions are proportionate to protect public health.

Our commitments to support Step 4 of the roadmap

Vaccination Programme

We will continue to work with authorities, DsPH and NHS partners to maximise the roll out of the vaccination programme.

Testing, Tracing and Self-Isolation

We will plan to have a Test, Trace and Isolate system that is proportionate to the risk posed.

We will continue to make symptomatic testing freely available to all over the coming months, and strongly encouraged for all people with relevant symptoms.

In order to reduce the spread of infection, tracing known contacts of positive cases remains critical, and the importance of self-isolation for positive cases and contacts is being reinforced.

We will continue to support individuals who need to self-isolate, for example via the Test and Trace support payments for individuals on a low income.

Continue to offer asymptomatic testing, which will be particularly focused on those who are not fully vaccinated, those in education, and those in higher-risk settings such as the NHS, social care, and prisons;

Continue to provide free COVID-19 rapid tests to all. Our efforts will focus on driving uptake where it is most needed, such as for those who are not fully vaccinated, those in high-risk groups, and those in education.

We will continue to encourage use of the NHS COVID-19 App which is an important public health tool helping to break the chains of transmission of the virus, adapting it to respond to the changing policy environment during Step 4.

Contact Tracing will continue and businesses will be strongly encouraged to continue to display QR codes and collect customer contact details. The legal requirement to do so will be repealed.

We will continue to work with national, regional and local partners to prevent, manage and contain outbreaks of COVID-19.

Community testing will continue to support local authorities to focus on disproportionately impacted and other high-risk groups.

We will continue to use analysis and scientific expertise to inform our response, with a commitment to strengthen programmes, including enhancing our genomic sequencing and surveillance capabilities, to support this work.

We will continue to review and adapt our services in line with the changing pandemic, responding rapidly to ensure that they are optimal to protect public health in a cost-effective way.

Our delivery to date

As of the end of August 2021 we have:

Increased our testing and tracing capability to the extent that in England, as at 31 August, a total of 266,162,196 virus tests have been conducted, 6,868,164 people have tested positive at least once, and 12,887,659 contacts have been made. Around half of the population in England have been tested at least once since the launch of NHS Test and Trace;

Expanded lab capacity through the opening of the Rosalind Franklin laboratory, Leamington which, once fully operational in the late Autumn, will be capable of processing hundreds of thousands of tests per day;

Developed the ‘New Variant Assessment Platform’ which offers the UK’s world-leading genomics expertise to countries without equivalent capabilities, strengthening existing international surveillance relationships through shared sequencing and data analysis;

Enhanced sequencing capacity to over 30K a week with significant improvements in turnaround around times and enabling 15 variants of interest and variants of concern to be identified, tracked and controlled within the population;

Explored the use of artificial intelligence to support the accurate reading of lateral flow test results. Started a 3-month pilot of this technology in a sub-set of care homes, educational settings, GP practices and selected private sector organisations with large workforces;

Built capabilities to calculate pandemic metrics (R, incidence and growth rates and improved our processes for combining models for determining key metrics in order to establish regular and robust national capabilities in place of current emergency arrangements (through SAGE);

Established the ‘real world’ effectiveness of 1 and 2 doses of AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines against infection, transmission, symptomatic disease, hospitalisation and death, including the world’s first estimate of protection against the Delta variant;

Identified and provided rigorous analysis and evidence on the spread of the Delta variant (B 1.617.2) in England;

Undertaken the Agile surveillance of severe acute respiratory infections through SARI Watch; in 2020 PHE rapidly aligned its surveillance system for influenza and high threat respiratory pathogens for intensive care and hospital admissions to the emerging Coronavirus threat;

Developed the COVID-19 Health Inequalities Monitoring for England (CHIME) tool to bring together data for effects such as mortality rates, hospital admissions, confirmed cases and vaccination uptake. The tool supports users to identify and address inequalities within their areas and identify priority areas for recovery. It also illustrates how inequalities have changed during the course of the pandemic and what the current cumulative picture is;

Monitored uptake of vaccination, putting data routinely into the public domain jointly with NHSEI, providing daily data for the UK Dashboard, data for Directors of Public Health (DsPH) to support local action and to support activity by the JCVI, JSAT, SPI-M as well as senior decision-making groups;

Provided weekly reviews of vaccine coverage in Adult Social Care settings and produced regular outbreak reports for Ministers and key delivery partners;

Listened to local authorities and collaborated with them through our data insights and sharing strategy to provide more timely and automated access to data and dashboards, particularly on testing operations and variants;

Scaled the Isolation Assurance Service for international arrivals so that we call all international ‘Amber’ arrivals each day, strengthening the messaging to promote compliance with the 10-day quarantine requirement and with the required tests at days 2 and 8 of the quarantine period;

Increased our Outbreak Identification and Rapid Response capabilities across the country, learning from the expertise in PHE’s Health Protection Teams (HPTs) to detect, assess and respond to potential clusters as identified through contact tracing data, using health intelligence tools which support outbreak detection, response and situational awareness, such as the integrated common exposure report tool (iCERT);

Completed clinical trials of Daily Contact Testing in schools, where pupils identified as close contacts of positive cases are offered the option to test daily as an alternative to self-isolating;

Continued to deliver world-leading population infection surveillance programmes on specific high-risk groups and settings, including health and social care workers and children, to inform our understanding of infections, including the driver and determinants of infection status and susceptibility in the UK population;

Mitigated the variant threat through targeted case finding in local areas and cluster networks linked to variants of concern or under investigation, as set out in the Contain Framework;

Published 575 peer-reviewed scientific articles to date, 82% (473) of which were published as open access and 86% (493) of which were undertaken in collaboration with other organisations;

Published over 40 unique pieces of guidance including definitive government guidance on staying safe, self-isolation and management of contacts for those with symptoms or a positive test result;

Translated guidance in up to 30 languages other than English which is also available in easy-read formats on our dedicated GOV.UK COVID-19 pages;

Provided expert public health advice for around 200 pieces of guidance owned by other government departments and industry, including guidance on how to work safely in a range of settings, and setting up of a How To Work Safely group to ensure Adult Social Care guidance is user friendly;

Provided evidence-based public health advice to policy makers and Ministers on a range of issues including post-vaccination policy, asymptomatic testing, relaxation of NPIs and travel;

Expanded our wastewater monitoring capability, which now covers 70% of the population of England;

Supported the delivery of the roadmap through our analysis of the government’s 4 tests for moving through the roadmap out of lockdown;

Developed a risk assessment methodology for public health, used to inform the Global Travel Taskforce’s traffic light system and its task of opening safe travel to Green List countries;

Developed financial and practical support policy measures to help individuals to self-isolate successfully. Since September 2020, local authorities have received £280 million to administer the Test and Trace Support Payment (TTSP) scheme and support low-income workers who are required to self-isolate, cannot work from home and will lose income as a result. In addition, since March 2021 the government has made up to £20 million a month available to English local authorities to fund a discretionary scheme to support people who fall outside the scope of the main scheme, but who will face hardship if they are required to self-isolate;

In the first 6 months of the 2021 to 2022 financial year we have provided £85.5m to LA’s to fund practical support schemes supporting those who are self-isolating. In addition, funding is provided to support the Medicines Delivery Service, which provides free delivery of prescription medicines to those who are self-isolating.

4 key themes of our work

As we continue to adapt our services in response to changing prevalence and the implications of new policies, we remain focused on delivering against the 4 key themes of our work:

• develop a response that works for all, designed to reduce inequitable health impacts and targets enduring transmission
• ensure our advice, guidance and actions are evidence-based and timely
• continually improve our end-to-end service, in line with evidence of need
• help contain further outbreaks, particularly variants of concern

We will continue to develop a response that works for all, designed to reduce inequitable health impacts and targets enduring transmission

Evidence shows that the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on certain population groups. We must continue to deliver services that are tailored to their specific needs, easy to find and accessible so that everyone can get the support they need. This requires continued focussed efforts to ensure steps are taken across the entire end-to-end test, trace and isolate service to minimise inequitable impacts of COVID-19-19 across our society.

This disproportionate impact has resulted in pockets of enduring transmission that require additional action. We will continue to work with local and regional teams, as well as the voluntary and community sector, to tailor and target our operational delivery, policy interventions and engagement. These bespoke services must be available, where needed, to make it easy for individuals to get the support they need and aid a successful return to a more normal way of life.

We will also look to transform our current services to our partners in areas such as data provision and will continue to build long-standing relationships and undertake meaningful engagement with them.

Our commitments

We will focus our efforts on: obtaining and sharing better data to improve our insight into the impact of the virus and to provide local areas with better data to help target need; and undertaking specific actions to better meet peoples’ needs and provide more flexibility to deliver models for community testing. We will:

• improve the use of existing data, monitoring and surveillance systems to assess the impact of COVID-19 on disproportionately impacted and inclusion health groups, to influence our wider response, including how we respond to outbreaks and provide access to testing and vaccinations
• design and deliver tailored strategic communication campaigns with local authorities and voluntary organisations that drive awareness, engagement and take-up among disproportionately impacted groups, beginning with areas of enduring transmission
• build new service journeys that better meet the needs of disproportionately impacted and underserved groups, focusing initially on improving language and accessible format provision across our services to ensure parity of access
• continue to develop our national capability to provide saliva-based testing using Direct LAMP for vulnerable groups, such children with special education needs and disabilities, or prison populations

We will continue to support local partners to deliver appropriate services for areas and communities of enduring transmission. We will:

• establish and embed a standardised evaluation framework that can be used to assess and track our progress in tackling enduring transmission, with a focus on how this affects underserved and disproportionately impacted groups
• support every local authority to deliver targeted community testing, to reflect local priorities and reach people and groups who are disproportionally impacted by the pandemic, and who are part of groups that are underserved
• tackle areas of enduring transmission through working with local partners to ensure that the end-to-end process is simple and accessible
• work with local authorities and their local system partners to develop additional support for the areas facing the biggest challenges with enduring transmission, and agree a locally driven action plan that includes the ability to flex and deploy national programmes creatively to bring down prevalence and transmission
• empower local authorities and health and care providers to design and pilot innovative approaches, with an initial focus on improving compliance with self-isolation, to tackle enduring transmission and variant outbreaks. We will encourage organisations to share their insights on ‘what works’ with other local authorities and providers

We will ensure our advice, guidance and actions are evidence-based and timely

We will continue to develop our surveillance, genomics, evaluation and public health capabilities to produce a broad range of analysis, evidence and guidance. The breadth and scale of this crisis has increased the importance of ensuring that evidence and data are at the heart of our response. We will continue to be guided by the science, drawing on clinical and academic expertise, and expanding our research and analysis capabilities to enable us to understand the real-world impacts of the pandemic and how we should respond.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) will be at the heart of this evidence-based approach, bringing together laboratories, data science, risk assessment and public health expertise to provide analysis and insight on COVID-19, and the drivers and risk factors of transmission and impact. The skills and capabilities developed during the pandemic will provide a firm basis for the strength of the future system for health security.

The UK already has world-leading surveillance capabilities and genomics programmes, and we will continue to develop these to help us assess and understand the differences in prevalence and impact between places and groups, identify and manage outbreaks early, and help us monitor the threat from variants, both domestic and imported.

Our commitments

We will continue to provide high quality evidence and advice to decision makers across our organisations, local, regional and national government, clinicians, other public bodies and the private sector. We will:

• maximise our analytical capability and evidence assessment to support and empower decision making in national and local government, and the private sector – this includes the work of the JBC in characterising the changing relationship between infection, severe disease and death in the context of vaccine roll out and new variants, and quantifying the drivers of enduring transmission
• expand the Local Data Spaces (LDS) Initiative, which builds upon the secure data sharing, analytical infrastructure and technical expertise of the Office for National Statistics, so that the LDS capability becomes part of the future health protection landscape
• optimise our specialist evidence review capabilities and further develop relationships with academic and industry groups, to provide clear and authoritative advice across government, the NHS and stakeholders
• participate in research activity with implications for Adult Social Care policy through connections with the National Institute for Health Research and other academic institutions as co-investigators and collaborators;
• support Ministers to make effective risk-based decisions on international travel through the provision of high quality risk assessments
• support the roll out of the NHS COVID-19 vaccination programme by providing analytical support, clinical and public health leadership
• work with other public sector bodies to monitor the vaccine roll-out, address misinformation, support the Vaccine Taskforce and monitor vaccine impact, especially on deaths and hospitalisations and its effectiveness against variants of concern
• continue to support the Events Research Programme, working collaboratively with DCMS and BEIS to determine the extent to which these events can operate safely
• continue to work with representatives from HPTs, NHS, DHSC and other key partners, to support efforts to prevent, control and learn from outbreaks in social care settings
• continuously monitor the effectiveness of our interventions so that learning can be shared, changes made where necessary, and promote value for money throughout our end-to-end service
• provide clear, evidence-based guidance and advice for industry and the public, to prevent people from contracting the virus in the first place, and help them reduce the spread
• work with colleagues in DHSC, Cabinet Office, other government departments, local and regional government and NHS to deliver public health and clinical guidance that is accessible and tailored to different communities and promotes safe behaviours
• ensure we have evidence to support policy and purchasing decisions in considering value in a broad socio-economic sense
• adapt guidance for the public and specific sectors, including children and young people, schools, colleges, universities, and adult social care settings, to reflect the government roadmap and support the population to adopt safe behaviours

We will continue to develop our surveillance capabilities to inform situational awareness and understand the spread and nature of the virus, which will inform our response to the pandemic. This includes routine surveillance systems as well as through the community population household survey and studies in specific areas such as the Vivaldi study in care homes and SIREN in healthcare workers. We will:

• maintain enhanced population level infection surveillance through established surveillance systems, active studies, syndromic and healthcare surveillance and other mechanisms, to identify new and emerging variants, and the spread of already identified variants, including any change to the variants or symptom response/profile, including from those travel imported strains, to inform changes in policy actions and measures and to understand long COVID better
• gather more information at the first contact with a case to gain a better understanding of risk factors and transmission
• continue to assess and pilot innovative surveillance techniques, including expanding wastewater surveillance and increasing the level of genomic surveillance and sequencing of travel imported strains, coupled with linking data sources, to enrich our understanding of the virus. We will share our insights with our partners to support local and national decision making

We will further optimise our wastewater monitoring capabilities (which currently cover around 70% of the population of England) into a national surveillance capability, monitoring wastewater from across England to inform our understanding of the current national epidemiological picture.

We will establish a diagnostic accelerator function to more quickly validate and introduce new testing technologies that can improve our service offer. Our learnings from this function will be transitioned into UKHSA and should inform future models for introducing new healthcare related technology beyond COVID-19.

We will continually improve our end-to-end service, in line with evidence of need

We will continue to build on the capabilities that we have created to tackle the pandemic. We will continue to work with local authorities and communities to optimise our tracing services and support people who need to self-isolate. Across our end-to-end service we will increase participation and reach amongst disproportionately impacted groups and those in areas of enduring transmission.

We will be targeted, responsive and flexible, with tailored communication channels and novel delivery models where needed. We will be open to new and innovative approaches to testing where these offer opportunities to improve our service, for example the use of saliva-based Direct LAMP for testing vulnerable groups.

We will employ an integrated digital and human approach through the locally led Community Testing Programme. This combines our national and regional capability with local partners, including DsPH, expanding local contact tracing partnerships. This will allow us to continue delivering a strong and integrated, local, regional and national response in England. We are committed to empowering local decision makers to support local delivery of their outbreak management plans, taking a cross-system view of issues, pooling and sharing resources, evidence and data and to engage, inform and involve our communities.

We will work with local government and community groups to improve the support available to people to self-isolate. We will continue to deliver services to protect the country from imported cases from international arrivals, including supporting travellers from ‘Amber’ countries with compliance with the 10-day quarantine requirement and the required tests at days 2 and 8 of the quarantine period.

Our commitments

We will continue to adjust the mix of testing to reflect the changing nature of the pandemic as well as vaccine roll out, and to make our offer as simple as possible whilst continuing to target high risk groups and settings. We will:

• continue to offer PCR testing to anyone who has symptoms. We have invested
  in new innovative testing technology which means we can operate faster and with increased capacity and develop a flexible pandemic response infrastructure that can respond to surges in demand
• make it as simple as possible for people without symptoms to test regularly by simplifying our distribution landscape through reviewing and reducing our channels
• continue to offer asymptomatic testing, which will be particularly focused on those who are not fully vaccinated, those in education, and those in higher-risk settings such as the NHS, social care, and prisons;
• continue to provide access to free COVID-19 rapid tests in the coming months
• continue to bring forward and support innovative testing modalities that improve the fight against COVID-19 and help with testing in vulnerable communities
• pilot the use of testing for multiple respiratory illnesses at the same time through use of multiplex technology, providing additional information for individuals and healthcare professionals, and increasing our ability for flu surveillance
• ramp up our viral sequencing capacity and analytical capability
• scale back our employer testing programme to workplaces in England whilst re-directing workers to access testing from the Home Channel or their local pharmacy
• support the growth of a flourishing, innovative and well-regulated private market for tests and testing services, ensuring the quality of tests available on the private market are equal to the high standards demanded by NHS testing

We will continue to trace cases and contacts as quickly as possible, including through our NHS COVID-19 App. We will:

• provide app users with useful, more localised features and advice that help them make well-informed decisions as they navigate their way through life with COVID-19
• continue making it easier for users to input their positive test results and share them anonymously with app users, enabling the rapid notification of potential transmission risk to known and unknown contacts
• continue identifying the barriers to uptake and adoption of the app, particularly across under-represented communities, and help users overcome these in order to ensure we provide an equitable service for all
• modify contact tracing in line with best available evidence including the impact of vaccination
• roll out the new Integrated Trace System to make the case and contact tracing process more efficient, reliable and scalable to provide a better user experience for call handlers and the public
• speed up contact tracing by piloting the provision of cases directly to local authorities as soon as they are available, to build on our earlier work to accelerate the tracing of cases with variants of concern

We will continue to encourage high compliance with self-isolation. We will:

• ensure that work continues in developing daily contact testing
• support potential new testing and self-isolation strategies
• review the Test and Trace Support Payment Scheme, Medicines Delivery Service and Local Authority Framework, enabling councils to expand their practical and emotional support until the end of September 2021
• update all applicable guidance to be clear, succinct and accessible, reflecting the direction of the Prime Minister’s announcements of 5 July 2021

We will update the self-isolation regulations and ensure that any new regulations or guidance are communicated clearly to those that need the information most. We will:

• update the self-isolation regulations to exempt those who are fully vaccinated and the under-18s from the legal duty to self-isolate if they have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19
• ensure that communications around regulation changes include a focus on providing tailored information to under-represented and disproportionately impacted groups
• retain the core message of test, trace and isolate at the core of any new messaging

We will help contain further outbreaks, particularly variants of concern

We need to maintain our focus on containing outbreaks where they occur, especially those involving variants, to reduce infection, hospitalisations and deaths. This will prevent our vaccination rollout coming under threat from new strains of the virus.

The risk that new variants develop and, in some cases, lead to vaccine evasive disease is directly linked to the extent of viral replication. To reduce this risk we need to minimise viral transmission within our borders and ensure we have effective border controls that reduce the risk of imported disease, particularly from countries with known variants of concern and high or unknown levels of viral transmission. We will continue to work with international partners and the academic community to understand the threat from variants and mutations where they are detected. This must be supplemented by continued rapid and effective outbreak identification, investigation and management.

Sequencing positive cases will identify new and emerging variants and changes in known variants. Using genotype assay PCR tests for agreed mutations in variants of concern will show us where there are variant cases that need further public health intervention. Where we identify areas of high prevalence, localised outbreaks or variant cases, we will deploy dynamic responses tailored to the specific circumstances of the threat. This will include the use of mobile processing units to speed up the time it takes to get test results.

Where there are variant cases, we will continue to support local authorities to surge asymptomatic testing to understand spread and suppress transmission. We are also supporting work to prevent or identify new variants entering the UK via international travel, through testing pre- and post-arrival in the UK, genomic sequencing, and enhanced self-isolation support for those returning from abroad.

Any outbreak or variant response demands a strengthened focus on health inequalities and underrepresented groups, as it will be harder to identify increasing transmission in communities that are less engaged until infections spill over into the wider community. As well as making our services more equitable, this approach will help us reduce the risk of new clusters emerging from undetected infections, protecting both underrepresented groups and the community as a whole.

Our commitments

We will continue to refine the App and encourage its use. We will:

• improve the functionality and use of the NHS COVID-19 App to support outbreak management. Using this App and GOV.UK Notify, we will notify individuals that they have been to a venue that others who have since tested positive for COVID-19 have visited, and advise them to take extra care and book a test

We will continue to improve our processes for identification of variants and mutations. We will:

• establish sufficient readily available sequencing capacity and analytical capability to meet demand priorities, which are informed by the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group
• roll out new techniques to speed up variant identification for all positive COVID-19 tests, including genotyping assays for samples to identify known variants of concern within 10 hours, in parallel with full genomic sequencing process
• work with the 15 countries selected to support UK Genomics solutions and immunological testing– from developing in-country capabilities, technology and data analytical support to managing whole-sample testing, sequencing and bioinformatics output
• provide timely assessment of the risk posed by new variant strains of COVID-19, both in the UK and internationally, and enhance and embed the analysis and response required to enable the identification and containment of outbreaks

We will continue to support local partners and work with the devolved administrations to respond rapidly to local outbreaks and variants. We will:

• support local councils to deliver the outbreak responses that fit their communities best, using the funding secured for the continuing Contain Outbreak Management Fund and the updated Contain Framework
• support local systems with the development and implementation of their Local Outbreak Management Plans, as well as specialist advice from HPTs
• continue follow up of high risk variants by HPTs with the use of targeted case finding to identify both the potential source and any additional cases
• establish a clearer set of system indicators and reporting mechanisms for local teams to improve the measurement of the impact and success of local and cluster tracing, to support strong performance everywhere
• work with local authorities and their local system partners to develop additional support for the areas facing the biggest challenges with enduring transmission, agreeing locally driven action plans with the ability to flex and deploy national programmes creatively to bring down prevalence and transmission
• continue to perform risk assessment studies and provide data on vaccine effectiveness against new variants of concern
• continue to evaluate booster vaccines including those based on new variants of concern

Future plans

Public Health England and NHS Test and Trace have collaborated effectively and efficiently to respond to the pandemic and reduce its impact. Our combined efforts, along with partner organisations, and national and local government, have been recognised and valued as they have led the government’s public health response to the pandemic.

Until the end of September we are in a period of transition as functions, staff, assets and funding will transfer from PHE and DHSC to the newly formed UKHSA, which will be fully operational from 1 October 2021.

UKHSA will bring together our world-leading public health science and expertise, cutting-edge capabilities in data analytics and genomic surveillance, and diagnostic and tracing capability, to become this country’s permanent standing capacity to prepare for, prevent and respond to threats to health, including continuing the work to respond to the COVID-19 virus and variants.

During its first year of operation, UKHSA will set out its role, core functions and key priorities in a strategic plan covering the years 2022 to 2023, 2023 to 2024 and 2024 to 2025, with the first year forming its business plan.