Asymptomatic coronavirus testing is to be rolled out across the country

All 317 local authorities will be encouraged to sign up, with a focus on testing people who are unable to work from home during the national lockdown.

Expansion of asymptomatic testing will identify more positive cases of Covid-19 and ensure those infected can isolate.

A total of 131 local authorities have signed up to community testing so far, with 107 already having started testing.

NHS Test and Trace will also work closely with other government departments to scale up workforce testing.

Many are already piloting regular workforce testing, including 15 large employers across 64 sites, with organisations in the food, manufacturing, energy and retail sectors, and within the public sector including job centres, transport networks and the military. An estimated 27,000 tests have taken place across the public sector so far.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: “With roughly a third of people who have coronavirus not showing symptoms, targeted asymptomatic testing and subsequent isolation is highly effective in breaking chains of transmission. Rapid, regular testing is led by local authorities who design programmes based on their in-depth knowledge of the local populations, so testing can have the greatest impact.

“We are now expanding this offer to every local authority across the country, and asking testing to be targeted on workers who cannot work from home during this national lockdown, while asking employers to work with us to scale up workforce testing.

“Lateral flow tests have already been hugely successful in finding positive cases quickly – and every positive case found is helping to stop the spread - so I encourage employers and workers to take this offer up. We must all do all we can to stop the spread of Covid, right now.”

Targeted, regular community testing using lateral flow tests has already identified more than 14,800 Covid-19 cases which would not have been found without targeted asymptomatic testing.

This latest expansion of the testing programme builds on the millions of asymptomatic critical workers being tested every week, such as NHS staff and care home workers.

Existing plans for the rapid testing of staff and students in secondary schools and colleges, and staff in primary schools, also remain in place.

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