Recommendation 13

We asked our witnesses about the role of the NHS COVID-19 app in ensuring that people self-isolate if they need to, particularly given suggestions that some people might delete the app or stop it being enabled in order to avoid having to self-isolate. The Chief Executive of the UKHSA told us that they were aware that some people were choosing not to use the app, but stressed that it continued to be important in alerting people they needed to self-isolate, and in passing information to large numbers of people quickly.22 The NAO reported that in late April 2021 around 16 million people had the app fully or partially enabled.23 In its letter to us after our evidence session, the Department and the Chief Executive of the UKHSA told us that the app had been downloaded over 27.1 million time since it was launched, but that they were unable to estimate the number of people who had the app enabled at any one time and therefore unable to provide us with more recent figures.24