The Department responded to the Observer on 17 July.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has made a number of recommendations for research on managing chronic pain, including the use of psychological therapies, acupuncture and pharmacological interventions.

NHS England and NHS Improvement are collaborating with stakeholders such as Versus Arthritis to co-produce and coordinate a strategy. Versus Arthritis have been commissioned to produce a decision support tool based on NICE guidance which can help people living with pain and their clinical teams understand all evidence-based options available. Alongside this tool, NHS England and NHS Improvement will also be publishing a commissioning framework to help local services reduce opioid prescribing in summer 2021.

The Government’s proposed Health and Care Bill will help local health and care systems deliver higher quality care to their local communities by establishing integrated care systems on a statutory basis.

The proposals will not change the role of local government in terms of its public health and social care responsibilities, the services it commissions or the funding of those services. An impact assessment for the Health and Care Bill will be published in due course.

The Cabinet Office launched the advertisement for the permanent Chair of the National Institute of Heath Protection on 2 March which closes on 9 March. Further stages of the recruitment process are pending the outcome of the advertisement.

Nurses will continue to be offered the vaccine beyond mid-February, which includes invitations for the second dose. Information on vaccinating staff has been shared across the healthcare system briefing employers to ensure their staff are offered, and book appointments for, the vaccine.

While it is the responsibility of individual employers to arrange for their staff to be vaccinated, the National Health Service (NHS) has now also opened the National Booking Service to ensure that it is as easy as possible for nurses and other frontline health and social care workers, particularly those working outside the NHS, to access the vaccine. Staff using this service will be asked when booking to self-certify that they are eligible and will be told to take proof of their employment to their appointment at a vaccination centre or pharmacy-led site.

Local NHS employers are using tried and tested methods to encourage take-up within their organisations, based on the annual flu campaign This includes the provision of specific staff campaign materials; extensive engagement by senior nursing figures, such as Ruth May, Chief Nursing Officer for England who regularly endorses and appeals for nurses to book vaccine appointments on behalf of the profession; and targeted engagement with nurses from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds designed to address queries as well as encouraging new international nurses to book appointments too. There is also ongoing information shared on social media for healthcare workers with staff and high profile health professionals sharing their vaccine stories.

Each of the Departmental COVID-19 contracts contain information on the award criteria, whether as a Direct Award using regulation 32(2)(c) under the Public Contract Regulations 2015 under which authorities are allowed to procure goods, services and works with extreme urgency in exceptional circumstances or a call off contract from an existing Government framework contract.

The Government has allocated a total of £22 billion to the Test and Trace programme in 2020-21 with a further £15 billion for 2021-22.  All contracts are being monitored to ensure that performance and quality assurance standards are being met. Where poor performance has been identified we have taken appropriate measures to rectify this.

No such assessment has been made.

Baroness Harding was appointed interim Chair of the National Institute of Health Protection on 18 August 2020 by the Prime Minister, while recruitment for a permanent candidate is completed. Baroness Harding receives no remuneration for this role or as Head of NHS Test and Trace.

We are considering the Centre for Mental Health modelling report as well as other relevant emerging evidence as part of our ongoing monitoring of the potential impact of COVID-19 on mental health.

We recognise that there is the potential for the COVID-19 pandemic to impact on people’s mental health and wellbeing. As such, we are working with the National Health Service, Public Health England and others, including local authorities to gather evidence and assess the potential longer-term mental health impacts of COVID-19.

As part of our plans for the NHS, as set out in the NHS Long Term Plan, there will be a comprehensive expansion and transformation of mental health services over the next five years with additional funding of £2.3 billion a year by 2023/24. Over half of this will go to improving community mental health services and services to help people experiencing mental health crises.

The Department regularly publishes the results of our community testing programmes.

Community testing for research purposes falls within Pillar 4, and the number of tests processed is available on the Testing tab of the Coronavirus Data page on GOV.UK, with positive cases reported on the Cases tab of the same webpage.

This data brings together various studies which are outlined in the COVID-19 Surveillance guidance page of GOV.UK, with specific data and analysis from each study available for download.

The Government does not have direct responsibility for pay awards in adult social care in the same way as for other areas of the public sector. The Government nonetheless maintains oversight of the social care system and we are committed to raising the profile of the social care sector. The Government expects local authorities to commission care at the rate that allows providers to employ the staff they need to deliver quality care.

We are taking action to support adult social care providers to recruit domestically. In order to attract more people to the sector we ran a national recruitment campaign. We are working with the Department for Work and Pensions to promote adult social care careers to jobseekers, and we have launched an online recruitment tool as part of this.

The restoration of NHS services should ensure that clinically urgent patients continue to be treated first, with priority then given to the longest waiting patients, specifically those breaching or at risk of breaching 52 weeks by the end of March 2021. Continued access to independent sector capacity will help support the recovery and restoration of elective services.

In addition, the Prime Minister has announced £3 billion of extra National Health Service funding to support the NHS this winter, and this includes ensuring the retention of the Nightingale hospital surge capacity and continued access to independent hospitals capacity to help meet patient demand. In the longer term, the NHS Long Term Plan aims to increase the amount of planned surgery year on year to reduce the waiting list. This will be supported by an NHS budget increase of £33.9 billion in cash terms by 2023/24.

The Government has always been clear that there will be opportunities to look back, analyse and reflect on all aspects of the response to COVID-19. As the Prime Minister has said, this will include an independent inquiry at the appropriate time.

The COVID-19 Clinical Assessment Service is regularly monitored and audited to ensure its safety and to safeguard the quality of clinical advice given to patients.

We are informed by NHS England and NHS Improvement that the National Health Service has not nationally cancelled any facility for ordering repeat prescriptions. While ordering online has proven hugely popular because of the convenience and ease, this will not be possible for everyone. Ordering of repeat prescriptions is for surgeries to arrange locally. However, national guidance is clear that every local practice must put in place a system for prescriptions, which can include online and phone orders, to meet the needs of their own patients.

Under the Care Act 2014, local authorities are required to shape their whole local markets to ensure that they are sustainable, diverse and offer high quality care and support for people in their local area.

On 15 April, the Department published COVID-19: Our Action Plan for Adult Social Care, which set out measures that the Government and other parts of the system were taking to support people in receipt of adult social care, both at home and in other settings. A copy of the Action Plan is attached. On 15 May, the Department published the Care Home Support Package backed by the £600 million Infection Control Fund. It sets out measures on infection prevention control, comprehensive testing, clinical support, local authority care homes support plans and support to build the workforce.

The Care Quality Commission conducts robust inspections to make sure that service providers meet quality and safety standards.

There are currently no plans to compensate staff or residents of care homes.

The Government has published a range of guidance to help care providers reduce the spread of infection. The guidance sets out advice for those affected on how to minimise risks of transmission, through good infection control practices, and set out some of the steps that local authorities and the National Health Service should take to support care providers through the pandemic. We will continue to update this guidance as is required.

For supplies of personal protective equipment, we encourage all care providers to continue to use their business as usual supply chains. Where this is not possible, we are supporting the existing supplier network by providing stock of PPE to 11 wholesalers for adult social care.

If a provider has been unsuccessful in obtaining PPE through these routes, they can approach their Local Resilience Forum (LRF) to set out their PPE needs. If they are unable to access PPE through their LRF, a provider can raise a request for an emergency pack of PPE through the National Supply Disruption Response system.

We are working with e-commerce experts to launch a Parallel Supply Chain, a new web-based system for procuring PPE which will be managed in line with the published guidance from Public Health England, integrated with NHS Supply Chain's central PPE logistic operations and shipped directly to providers via Royal Mail.  Over one million items have been delivered via the portal, which is now rolling out nationally to small residential and domiciliary care providers.

We have been developing pandemic response plans for many years working closely with our national and sector partners, including adult social care. Since the start of this outbreak we have continued to work with the adult social care sector and public health experts to put in place support for social care, including around personal protective equipment (PPE).

In mid-March, social care providers across England received an emergency drop of over seven million PPE items from the pandemic flu stockpile.

As of 29 May, we have released 127 million items of PPE to designated wholesalers for onward sale to social care providers. Between 6 April and 31 May we have authorised the release of over 124 million items of PPE to local resilience forums to help them respond to urgent local spikes in need across the adult social care system We have also mobilised a National Supply Disruption Response system to respond to emergency PPE requests, including for the social care sector.

We have developed a parallel supply chain with almost 3,000 providers to support the normal supply chain before the national roll out. This is a dedicated channel for critical PPE and core PPE products for Covid-19 are flowing through this. As of 15 May, over a million items have been delivered via the portal, which is now rolling out nationally to general practitioners and small residential and domiciliary care providers.

We are taking action to protect the mental health of all children and young people. Following on from our Green Paper on transforming children and young people’s mental health, we are:

- incentivising every school or college to identify and train a Senior Lead for Mental Health;

- creating new mental health support teams in and near schools and colleges; and

- piloting a four-week waiting time to allow swifter access to specialist NHS services for those children and young people who need them.

The Green Paper has the potential to significantly improve early intervention and prevention, along with expanding the current children and young people’s mental health workforce.