Health Secretary Matt Hancock was urged to justify the government’s roadmap for easing Covid restrictions during his TV round this morning. From tomorrow in England and Wales, indoor hospitality and entertainment businesses will be able to reopen their doors, and rules on meeting other people both inside and out will also be relaxed significantly. Hancock insisted it was right for Britain to go ahead with the next step in its easing of restrictions, but told Andrew Marr the decision to unlock the economy fully would not be taken until 14 June:
AM: Are you sure… that it is wise to go ahead with the unlocking at the rate that we’re doing?
MH: Yes, I am confident that we can take the step tomorrow, but we should all be careful about how we take that step… You still shouldn’t spend a lot of time in close proximity… We will take that decision [on full unlocking]… on the 14th June.
Hancock: We have ‘increasing confidence’ that vaccines are beating Indian variant
A new Indian variant of coronavirus has been rearing its head in several parts of the country, with Bolton in Greater Manchester bearing the brunt so far. The latest data indicates that there are 1,313 known cases of the variant in the UK. Hancock said that current hospitalisations were mostly in patients who had not received an approved vaccine, and cited early findings from the Oxford University laboratories that two doses of vaccine were still effective:
MH: We need to be alert to it, and we need to be vigilant… If people have been vaccinated twice, and then there has been a couple of weeks after the second jab, we have increasing confidence from very early lab data… that the vaccine is effective against the Indian variant, and you can see that on the ground in Bolton.
We have ‘some of the strongest border measures in the world’
Sophy Ridge challenged Hancock on the government’s approach to travel to and from India, which had not been placed on the ‘red list’ at a time when its neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh, were despite much lower instances of the coronavirus in their general population. Critics have accused the government of adopting a softer line towards India in order to help foster a post-Brexit trade deal, with the Prime Minister only cancelling a planned visit at the eleventh hour. However, Hancock told Ridge that important data about the virus was not known at the time:
‘We don’t rule out’ differing restrictions across UK
Ridge also asked Hancock if it was likely that the government could put different areas of the UK under different restrictions in order to try and get a grip on the virus, while still trying to keep the roadmap firmly on track:
MH: We don’t rule that out. The route that we’re taking in Bolton and Blackburn is to absolutely pile in testing and vaccinations to try to get on top of this.
Lobbying by former minister ‘absolutely appropriate’
Marr put Hancock on the spot over a PPE contract awarded to a Hong Kong firm which had been championed by Brooks Newmark, a former government minister. The company in question, Worldlink Resources, was offered a contract worth £178 million to provide the NHS with protective goggles:
MH: It was absolutely appropriate for people to get in contact with anybody at the Department for Health when the country desperately needed PPE… [It was] perfectly reasonable… to send on the email and say ‘Can we have a look at this?’, and then I didn’t have anything to do with the signing of any of these contracts.
Yvette Cooper – UK should not lift travel restrictions tomorrow
One of the restrictions being lifted tomorrow is the ‘Stay in the UK’ rule, permitting people to travel abroad to countries on the government’s ‘green list’ without having to provide a compelling reason for doing so. Passengers from these countries won’t have to undergo a mandatory quarantine on their return, provided they pass a Covid test. The chair of the Home Affairs select committee, Yvette Cooper, told Marr now was not the time for this aspect of opening up:
YC: I think the government needs to slow down its plans. I don’t understand why they’re going ahead with lifting some of the international travel restrictions tomorrow… The home quarantine system [and] the system for surveillance… needs to be much stronger… We have no idea what assessments the government is making… They need to publish those on a regular basis.
‘We’ve got a leader of the Labour party’
Cooper avoided Marr’s question about any ambitions she might harbour to reach the top of Labour’s greasy pole. She ran for the leadership in 2015, but was swept aside by Jeremy Corbyn’s meteoric ascendancy. However, after Labour’s poor performance in the English local elections last week, there remains the possibility that the leadership could find itself vacant once again before the next general election, with a third of Labour voters wanting Sir Keir Starmer to resign:
AM: Would you like to be leader of the Labour party one day?
YC: I think we’ve got a leader of the Labour party. He’s getting on with the job, and actually this is a challenge for the whole Labour party to show we’re a party not just of the cities, but of the whole country.
John Edmunds – Putting India on red list would have delayed, but not stopped variant
Professor John Edmunds, an infectious disease expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who is also an adviser to the government’s Sage committee, told Marr it was unlikely the government’s policy towards travel to India would have made a substantial difference in the long run:
AM: Do you think this could have been avoided if we closed the border to India more quickly and sharply at the time?
JA: I don’t think it would have been avoided. We could have delayed things a little bit… I think we should be concerned [about the variant], but not panicking. We’re in a much, much better place now than we were when the Kent variant hit us back in November and December.
Sir Mark Walport: ‘If you hug, hug cautiously!’
And finally, former chief scientific adviser Sir Mark Walport had some advice for anybody thinking that the latest unlocking meant that they should throw all caution to the wind:
MW: People have got to be sensibly cautious I think… Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should… If you’re going to hug, hug cautiously!… Tight clinches should be avoided!
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