However, both our Committees heard that other resources could have been used more effectively in the initial expansion of testing capacity. Professor Sir Chris Ham explained that initially the Government was “very much focused on building capacity in the commercial Lighthouse laboratories” but suggested that this focus was to the detriment of other potential capacity: if more had been done during the summer months […] for example, we could have made greater use of university laboratories and NHS laboratories—we might have been able to add capacity to avoid the bottlenecks that occurred [in September].279 Sir Paul Nurse also made this point, referring to an earlier press release by the Francis Crick Institute, stating: We argued very early on, in March it has to be said, that we should mobilise much more locally. We turned the Crick into a testing facility. We used that terrible metaphor of Dunkirk and little ships, and so on, but we produced a testing facility locally within two weeks that was doing 2,000 tests a day.280 275 Department of Health and Social Care, Coronavirus (COVID-19)—Scaling up our testing programmes, 4 April 2020 276 GOV.UK, ‘Health Secretary launches biggest diagnostic lab network in British history to test for coronavirus: 9 April 2020’, accessed 17 September 2021 277 Oral evidence taken before the Science and Technology Committee on 27 January 2021. HC (2019–21) 136, Q1812 278 Oral evidence taken before the Science and Technology Committee on 27 January 2021. HC (2019–21) 136, Q1812 279 Q338 280 Oral evidence taken before the Health and Social Care Committee on 21 July 2020, HC (19–21) 36, Q589; Francis Crick Institute, Francis Crick Institute and UCLH develop COVID-19 testing service for patients and NHS staff, 2 April 2020 Coronavirus: lessons learned to date 67 Professor Jo Martin, President of the Royal College of Pathologists, suggested that it was not strategically wrong to set up the Lighthouse Laboratory network to process testing on a