Guidance

Adult social care extension to Infection Control and Testing Fund 2021

Sets out the measures that the extension to the Infection Control and Testing Fund supports, including distribution of funds, conditions and reporting requirements. We’ve extended the fund until 30 September 2021.

Applies to England

Documents

Details

This guidance applies to the second round of the Infection Control and Testing Fund, which operated between July 2021 and September 2021. While this fund is no longer live, this guidance is preserved here for reference.

See the guidance for the latest round of funding, round 3.

The Infection Control and Testing Fund consolidated the Infection Control Fund and Rapid Testing Fund. By June 2021, these funding streams had provided almost £1.35 billion ring-fenced funding for infection prevention and control, and £288 million for rapid testing in care settings. This has now been extended again until 30 September 2021, providing an additional £251.3 million for the care sector.

The purpose of this fund is to support adult social care providers to:

  1. reduce the rate of COVID-19 transmission within and between care settings through effective infection prevention and control practices and increase uptake of staff vaccination

  2. conduct testing of staff and visitors in care homes, high risk supported living and extra care settings, in order to enable close contact visiting where possible

This brings the total ring-fenced funding for infection prevention and control to almost £1.49 billion and support for lateral flow testing to £396 million in care settings.

Published 2 July 2021
Last updated 26 October 2021 + show all updates
  1. Updated 'Annex E: ICTF2 reporting template 2 - due 29 October 2021' so that in the ‘Testing_allocation’ tab, cell W8 is calculated correctly, and in the ‘IPC_allocation’ tab, cell AG2 has been updated to provide additional clarity on the information required.

  2. Updated guidance to explicitly include the costs of PCR testing in the discretionary testing allocation.

  3. Added Annex E reporting templates.

  4. First published.