Recommendation 186

Evidence received by the Science and Technology Committee suggested that taking a centralised approach to increasing testing capacity was appropriate as it might not have been practical to focus on boosting local-level capacity alone. For example, Dr Richard Harling, Director of Health and Care for Staffordshire County Council, suggested that the expansion of testing capacity was “unlikely to be something we would have the expertise or specialism to do locally”.277 Similarly, Greg Fell, Director of Public Health at Sheffield City Council, suggested that while Sheffield was “very early in large-scale testing […] we quickly got to a stage where we needed the large-scale labs that we now have”.278