Following the initial shortage of testing capacity and the slow increase in the availability of tests during the critical first eight weeks of the pandemic, responsibility for the testing strategy was removed from Public Health England and vested in the Department of Health and Social Care. On 2 April the then Secretary of State announced a target of carrying out 100,000 covid tests a day by the end of the month.270 This was a personal initiative on the part of the then Secretary of State, Matt Hancock MP, to jump start substantial testing capacity. At the time witnesses to the Committees distanced themselves from the 100,000 target. For example, even the then Government testing tsar, Professor John Newton, said to the Science and Technology Committee “It is not a SAGE target; it is the Secretary of State’s target […] you would have to ask the Secretary of State himself exactly where he got his advice from.”271