Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Andrew Sparrow

UK coronavirus: 3,105 new cases amid rise in hospital admissions and patients on ventilators - as it happened

A woman administers a swab test to a girl at a Covid test site in South London.
A woman administers a swab test to a girl at a Covid test site in South London. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Afternoon summary

That’s all from me for today. But our coverage continues on our global coronavirus live blog. It’s here.

Updated

A worker at a mobile Covid-19 testing centre in Peterborough today.
A worker at a mobile Covid-19 testing centre in Peterborough today. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA

Sir Keir Starmer won’t be doing PMQs tomorrow, Labour has said, because he is still waiting for the results of the family Covid test. A spokesman said:

Keir Starmer is still awaiting the test result for a member of his family. He is therefore remaining in self-isolation and will not participate in prime minister’s questions tomorrow. Angela Rayner, deputy leader and shadow first secretary of state, will be taking his place. We have informed Number 10.

Updated

Why is the government claiming surplus testing capacity when people can't get tests?

Here is a good question from below the line.

User avatar for phesketh0

Andrew,

I wonder if you could help me understand something.

The current number of tests per day is below capacity, and in fact that has always been the case. If system is operating within its capacity, why can people not get tests? And why does Matt Hancock claim the system is seeing excessive demand?

As i understand it, either demand isn't the issue, or the figures for capacity aren't correct.

It is true that the number of people being tested on any given day has always been lower than the figure given for capacity on that day. Partly that’s just a function of the maths; the system cannot carry out more tests than it is capable of carrying out. But at times the gap between the two numbers has been huge and, if people are unable to access tests, any notional surplus capacity is actually bogus. If the capacity cannot be used to provide tests where they are needed, it might as well not be there.

The government has been a victim of its own spin. In early May Boris Johnson announced that, by the end of the month, the government would get testing up to 200,000 a day. Subsequently No 10 said this promise related to testing capacity, not tests actually carried out, and around this time the government started producing daily testing capacity figures that included antigen tests (that show whether you have got coronavirus) and antibody tests (that show whether you have had it). This was misleading; antibody tests are useful, but they don’t help the teacher with a cough who needs to know whether it is safe to go back to work. At the end of May the government claimed it had met its 200,000 per day target - even though only 127,722 antigen tests had been carried on the relevant day. To justify its claim, the government counted extra antigen testing capacity, plus the availability of 40,000 antibody tests.

The previous month Matt Hancock set a target of getting testing up to 100,000 a day by the end of April. He failed to achieve that in any proper sense, but he claimed to have reached his goal by including in the count a large batch of home testing kits that had been sent out just before the deadline but not yet processed. Subsequent figures showed that almost half home testing kits were never returned, or were sent back void.

In both cases spin trumped honesty. Ministers got a short presentational win. But they ended up undermining trust in the system because the positive headlines were based on a misuse of statistics.

More recently the government has started to make its testing capacity figures more honest. It has not abandoned the total testing capacity figure (which rescued Johnson at the end of May). But it has started publishing on its daily dashboard a testing capacity figure for pillars 1 and 2 (ie, just for antigen tests, and excluding antibody tests) and capacity by this measure is only just ahead of tests carried out, which is what you would expect from a system working flat out.

Today’s testing figures
Today’s testing figures Photograph: Gov.UK

Updated

And, on Brexit, this is from Sky’s Europe correspondent Adam Parsons.

Welsh government providing 5,000 extra hospital beds for further Covid waves

There will be an extra 5,000 hospital beds in Wales to cope with any fresh waves of coronavirus, the Welsh government has announced. Welsh health minister Vaughan Gething said:

The position remains precarious. The challenges this winter will be truly extraordinary. We must be prepared for the worst.

The Welsh government’s winter protection plan, published on Tuesday, says 5,000 beds are available to ensure health boards are able to manage future waves of Covid-19 and any potential spike in emergency admissions.

This has been achieved by retaining a range of field hospitals, new hospital facilities and additional bed capacity created in existing hospital sites.

The government wants 75% of people at risk, such as those with clinical conditions, and health and social workers, to receive the flu vaccine. It has 160m PPE items in stock, with orders placed for more than 300 million further items.

Gething has been questioned in the Welsh parliament about the accidental release online by Public Health Wales (PHW) of the details of more than 18,000 Welsh people who tested positive for coronavirus. (See 9.56am) PHW only revealed the error on Monday. Earlier the Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, said he only heard about it on Monday. Gething said he knew of it on 3 September.

The two main political stories dominating the agenda at Westminster - and on this blog - are coronavirus and Brexit, but it is not often they converge quite like this.

Covid hospital admissions and ventilation cases rising in England, figures show

The figure on the summary page of the UK government’s coronavirus dashboard for hospital admissions has not been updated since 2 September (because Scotland’s data only comes out weekly) but within the healthcare page there are statistics showing hospital admissions, hospital numbers and mechanical ventilation patients for England are all going up. Here are the key points.

  • The daily total for Covid patients being admitted to hospital in England has now passed 150. On 13 September, the most recent day for which a figure is available, it was 153. The previous day it was 143. Only a week ago the numbers were in double figures. The total has not been as high as 150 since early July. This is from John Roberts, a contributor to the work of the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group, earlier today.
  • The total number of coronavirus patients in hospital in England has now reached 866. That is the figure for 15 September, up from 782 the previous day. It has not been as high as this since late July.
  • The number of hospital patients in England receiving mechanical ventilation has now passed 100 again. Today’s figure is 101. It has not been this high since late July.

Updated

UK records 3,105 more coronavirus cases as recent sharp increase maintained

And the UK government has just updated the daily figures on its coronavirus dashboard. Here are the main figures.

  • The daily number of coronavirus cases has risen above 3,000 again. Today’s count is 3,105, up from 2,621 yesterday. Today’s total is lower than was recorded at the end of last week, but it is still only the fourth time the daily total has been above 3,000 since the end of May. The recent trend - a sharp increase - is being maintained.
Coronavirus cases
Coronavirus cases Photograph: Gov.UK
  • The UK has recorded 27 more coronavirus deaths. This is the highest daily recorded total for a week. It takes the headline total to 41,664, but this figure only records people who have died within 28 days of a coronavirus test, and so it significantly understates the true number of coronavirus deaths in the UK. Taking into account all deaths where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate, there have been more than 57,400 UK deaths.

There has been one further coronavirus death in Northern Ireland, the Department of Health there has announced in its latest daily update.

Turning back to Brexit for a moment, Newsnight’s Nicholas Watt says Boris Johnson has had a friendly meeting with Sir Bob Neill, the Conservative MP who is tabling a relative amendment that would ensure MPs had a vote on any government decision to use the powers in the internal market bill to override the withdrawal agreement.

Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham
A man speaks with with staff at a coronavirus testing facility in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham. Photograph: Jacob King/PA

Updated

In the Welsh parliament the Plaid Cymru leader, Adam Price, asked if figures from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine suggesting the R number is 1.4 in Wales were correct.

The first minister, Mark Drakeford, said the number was above 1 but he “wouldn’t sign up” to 1.43. He said: “There are whole parts of Wales where numbers are very successfully suppressed”.

Drakeford did not accept an invitation by the Conservative group leader, Paul Davies, to apologise for the fact that the details of more than 18,000 people who tested positive for coronavirus were published online by mistake by Public Health Wales. (See 9.56am.)

He said Public Health Wales “was right to apologise”. The first minister said that an investigation was taking place and initial inquiries suggested no harm had been done but he added: “That is [more] a matter of luck than anything else.”

Updated

Matt Hancock's UQ on coronavirus - Summary

Here are the main points from what was said during the Commons UQ (urgent question) to Matt Hancock, the health secretary, on coronavirus.

  • Hancock faced a barrage of complaints from MPs angry on behalf of constituents unable to obtain Covid tests. He faced particular criticism from the opposition, but Conservative MPs were lining up too to tell him their constituents were having the same problems. Hancock came to the dispatch box armed with figures that enabled him to say how many tests had been carried out in particular constituencies yesterday, but MPs were generally unimpressed. At this point a shout of “It’s a bloody mess” could be heard from Labour MP Wes Streeting, who was sat in the chamber. Afterwards many MPs complained again on Twitter. This is from Labour’s Liz Twist.

And this is from Labour’s Ian Lavery.

  • Hancock suggested that fixing the Covid testing shortage could take until October - contrary to what he told MPs last week. Last week he told the Commons health committee that it would take “a matter of a couple of weeks” to resolve the problems in the short term. But when Jeremy Hunt, the committee chair, reminded Hancock of that comment, and asked if it still applied (ie, if Hancock was now just one week away from a solution), Hancock replied: “Well I think that we will be able to solve this problem in a matter of weeks.”
  • Hancock said it was now necessary to prioritise access to coronavirus tests - and he implied that further restrictions could be introduced to ensure tests went to those who needed them most. (See 12.58pm.)
  • Hancock said the testing shortage was caused by lack of capacity in the laboratories where the results are processed. He said:

The capacity constraint that there is is in the labs rather than the centres. We have the centres available to be able to process a huge amount of tests ... but it is in the labs that the constraint is.

Now, we are bringing in more machines, they’re being installed all the time. That is why the capacity is constantly going up. But, nevertheless, clearly we need to keep driving that, because the demand is going up as well.

But he also claimed that the UK was carrying out more tests than “almost any other nation”. He said:

Everyone in this house knows that we’re doing more testing per head of population than almost any other major nation, and I can update the house that we have now carried out over 20 million tests for coronavirus in this country.

As we expand capacity further, we’re working around the clock to make sure everyone who needs a test can get a test.

  • MPs were told that people were finding it possible to book a coronavirus test by pretending to live hundreds of miles away from their home. The Twickenham MP Munira Wilson said that some of her constituents had been able to get a test in Twickenham by pretending to live in Aberdeen.

Hancock did not offer an explanation, but he said people should not try to game the test and trace system. The Oldham MP Jim McMahon suggested something similar might be happening to his town.

Also the population of Sweden followed some guidance that wasn’t enforced by law more closely than has been the case in almost any other country in the world.

  • Hancock said he would keep an “open mind” on whether young children should be excluded from the rule of six, as they are in Scotland and Wales. Asked if he would follow their lead, Hancock said:

I absolutely keep an open mind on all of these things and we constantly are looking at the evidence and the data and updating policy accordingly.

Updated

NHS England has recorded a further 14 coronavirus hospital deaths. The people who died were aged between 62 and 94 and they all had underlying health conditions. The full details are here.

Almost nine in 10 pupils have attended schools in England since their full reopening this month, government figures show. Around 92% of state schools were fully open on Thursday 10 September , and approximately 88% of students were back in class on the same day, the Department for Education analysis suggests.

Updated

There have been a further 110 cases of Covid-19 in Wales, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 19,681. Public Health Wales said no further deaths had been reported, with the total number of deaths since the beginning of the pandemic remaining at 1,597.

No 10 claims internal market bill covered by Salisbury convention, meaning peers must accept it

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the No 10 spokesman also claimed that the Salisbury convention - a non-statutory but widely respected rule saying the House of Lords does not vote down policies in a governing party’s election manifesto - applies to the internal market bill. The spokesman said:

We would expect the Lords to abide by the Salisbury convention.

Guaranteeing the full economic benefit of leaving the EU to all parts of the United Kingdom and ensuring Northern Ireland’s businesses and producers enjoy unfettered access to the rest of the UK were clear Conservative manifesto commitments which this legislation delivers.

This will be a contentious interpretation of the convention because the 2019 Conservative election manifesto said the party would implement the “great new deal” Boris Johnson had negotiated with the EU. But the internal market bill would give ministers powers to override key features of that deal relating to Northern Ireland. It has also been argued (eg, here) that, even if those powers were never used, passing the bill alone would constitute a breach of the withdrawal agreement.

Updated

People queuing today for a coronavirus test in Bury.
People queuing today for a coronavirus test in Bury. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the No 10 spokesman adopted the same line as Priti Patel (see 10.43am) when asked about people not being able to get coronavirus tests in particular areas. The spokesman said:

We would say that it is wrong to say that testing is not available in these areas. Our capacity continues to be targeted to where it is most needed, which is why booking slots and home testing kits are made available daily for people with symptoms.

Private labs unable to process all Covid tests, NHS email reveals

Laboratories that analyse swabs from people in the community, including care homes, were stretched to capacity even in late August, unable to process all the Covid test samples coming in and seeking help from the NHS, the Guardian can reveal. My colleague Sarah Boseley has the full story here.

Jason McCartney (Con) asks about parents in his constituency would could not get tests. He urges Hancock, “before we talk about the moon”, to get more testing available locally.

Hancock says that, as well as focusing on local testing, they do need to develop new technologies, so that these problems can be addressed in the long term.

The Commons UQ is now over. It was more illuminating than some of these sessions have been. I’ll post a summary soon.

Alicia Kearns (Con) asks Hancock if he will support her campaign for partners to be allowed to support pregnant women at all stage of labour.

Hancock says he will. He congratulates Kearns - hesitating when he says he does not know if her pregnancy is public knowledge. It is now, he says. (He seems to have had an assurance that it was.)

Updated

Hancock says he is “optimistic” about the chances of rapid-result testing becoming available. He says he is optimistic about lots of things. He needs to be in this job, he says.

Addressing the Speaker, Hancock also acknowledges that Sir Lindsay Hoyle has raised his own concerns about testing. (See 11.12am.) Hancock suggests it was legitimate for Hoyle to raise this.

Labour’s Debbie Abrahams asks Hancock to make sure that directors of public health are getting timely information about infections. Hancock says he will do this. He says he is working on “innovative solutions” to make this data sharing work better.

Hancock says the problems are caused by processing capacity in laboratories. But more machines are being brought in all the time to address this, he says.

Here is another extract from the opening statement from Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, at the start of the UQ.

We are at a perilous moment.

Imperial College estimates the virus is doubling every seven to eight days.

We all want to avoid further restrictions or another national lockdown.

But when testing breaks down, contact tracing breaks down, and the growth of this virus cannot be tracked.

The prime minister promised us whack-a-mole but instead his mallet is broken.

The secretary of state is losing control of this virus;

He needs to fix testing now.

Andrew Selous (Con) asks if the UK can learn from what happened in Sweden.

Hancock says he has looked closely at Sweden. He says in Sweden people followed social distancing guidance more closely than in many other places, even though the rules did not require that.

Back in the Commons Hancock says the case rate in Cornwall has stayed very low, even though many holidaymakers visited the county during the summer. He pays tribute to people in Cornwall for taking steps to keep people Covid secure.

From the BBC’s Evan Davis

Here is the clip of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, telling the BBC that testing is “actually a government success”.

Tim Farron (Lib Dem) says there is a “terrifying” backlog for cancer treatment. Hde says, even working at 135% capacity, it would take six months to clear this.

Hancock says he feels very strongly about this. He will look at any ideas proposed to speed this up.

In his response to Hancock earlier, Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary asked why the government did not foresee a rise in infections. He added:

When schools reopen and people return to workplaces and social distancing becomes harder infections rise.

So extra demand on the system was inevitable, so why didn’t he use the summer to significantly expand NHS lab capacity and fix contact tracing?

Tim Loughton, a Conservative, says he is getting many reports of children being turned away from school if they have the sniffles. He says testing is not at a record high in his constituency.

Hancock says, when schools go back, children often get a normal cold. That is contributing to the increase in demand.

On the government’s “moonshot” plan, Hancock says there are no plans to carry out 10m tests per day. But the government does want to get testing into the millions.

(This is misleading. Whether or not it is an official target, the 10m tests per day figure was clearly set out in leaked official documents about the project reported by the Guardian.)

Extract from leaked official document about Moonshot
Extract from leaked official document about ‘moonshot’ Photograph: Guardian

Updated

Labour’s Stephanie Peacock asks if Hancock will apologise to a constituent in Barnsley who could not get a test.

Hancock says more than 600 people in Barnsley did get a test yesterday. He asks Peacock to provide details of this case.

Stephen Crabb, a Conservative, asks about the rule of six. Wouldn’t it be better to have one rule for the whole of the UK? And can children be exempt from the way the rule works in England?

Hancock says the government is keeping the issue of children under review. But they were included to keep the rule simple.

More from what Matt Hancock has been telling the Commons

Hancock says Covid tests are now having to be prioritised, with further restrictions possible

This is what Hancock said in his opening statement about needing to prioritise people for testing.

We’ve seen a sharp rise in people coming forward for a test, including those who are not eligible.

And throughout this pandemic we have prioritised testing according to need. Over the summer, when demand was low, we were able to meet all requirements for testing, whether priorities or not.

But as demand has risen, so we are having to prioritise once again. And I do not shirk from decisions about prioritisation. They are not always comfortable, but they are important.

The top priority is, and always has been, acute clinical care.

The next priority is social care, where we’re now sending over 100,000 tests a day because we’ve all seen the risks this virus poses in care homes.

We’ll set out in full an updated prioritisation and I do not rule out further steps to make sure tests are used according to those priorities. It is a choice that we must make.

Hancock says it will take “matter of weeks” to resolve testing shortage

Jeremy Hunt, the chair of the Commons health committee, said a week ago Hancock said it would take two weeks to sort out these delays. He asked if Hancock still thought he would be able to sort this out within a week from now.

Hancock said that he thought this could be sorted out within a matter of weeks. He told Hunt:

Well I think that we will be able to solve this problem in a matter of weeks and in his own constituency yesterday 194 people got their tests. So we are managing to deliver record capacity, but as he well knows demand is also high and the response to that is to make sure we have prioritisation so the people who most need it can get the tests that they need.

  • Hancock says it will take “matter of weeks” to resolve testing shortage.

Updated

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, is responding to the urgent question on coronavirus now.

He starts by saying cases are going up around the world. France and Spain are recording more than 10,000 cases daily. And the UK had 2,600 new cases daily.

He says there are signs the number of cases in care homes, and the number of hospitalisations, is rising.

That is why the rule of six was introduced, he says. He says the government did not do this lightly.

He says the UK has carried out 20m tests in total, and is doing more testing than almost any other country.

He says the average distance travelled for a test is now 5.8 miles - down from 6.4 miles last week.

But he says some people are getting tests when they do not need them. That is why prioritisation is important, he says.

He says people in clinical care should get priority. After that social care gets priority.

He says he will be publishing updated guidance on prioritisation. He will not “shirk from decisions on prioritisation”, he says.

  • Hancock signals that access to testing could be prioritised for those most in need.

UPDATE: See 12.58pm for the full quote.

Updated

Nicola Sturgeon revealed that she had a “constructive” conference call with Matt Hancock and Dido Harding yesterday evening, after raising urgent concerns with the UK government about significant delays getting Covid test results from the UK’s rapid testing centre.

At her daily briefing, the Scottish first minister said that she had “sought assurances that Scotland will continue to get fair access to UK wide testing capacity” and that her government would continue to monitor the situation.

There were 267 positive cases yesterday, 101 in Greater Glasgow and Clyde and 59 in Lanarkshire, both boards that are under further household gathering restrictions, as well as one additional death.

Sturgeon said that there was some evidence that the ongoing ban on household visits in seven local authority areas in the west of Scotland was having an impact on infection rates, but that the restrictions would continue for another week, with the next review on September 22.

She also warned the public about fake callers pretending to be contact tracers, who have been trying to con people into giving out their bank details by claiming that there is a charge for the service. She underlined that this was a scam and that all testing and tracing was free. “You should just put the phone down on them straight away.”

She said that she was seeking advice on whether it was possible to have greater flexibility for children, for example for birthday parties, and would report on this later in the week.

Nicola Sturgeon at her briefing today.
Nicola Sturgeon at her briefing today. Photograph: BBC News

Updated

In his speech to the TUC virtual conference, delivered from his home, where he has been self-isolating, Sir Keir Starmer said the unavailability of tests was “completely unacceptable”. He said:

Yesterday, my family were able to get a test quickly when we needed one.

But only because my wife works for the NHS in a hospital that provides tests for staff and their families.

For thousands of people across the country it’s a very different story.

And after six months of this pandemic, that’s completely unacceptable.

Whatever Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock might say, it’s not the British people that are to blame for these mistakes.

It isn’t civil servants. Care home workers. Or mutant algorithms. It’s this government.

It’s the government that’s holding Britain back.

BMA urges government to be honest with public about scale of NHS backlog

Doctors have told the government it needs to be honest with the public about the scale of the NHS backlog caused by the pandemic and provide the cash needed to deal with it. As PA Media reports, delegates attending the British Medical Association’s annual representative meeting passed a motion calling on the union to work with the government to develop a public information campaign on the NHS backlog and likely timescale for returning to normal services.

The motion also called for the union to demand adequate funding for the NHS to increase its capacity to address the backlog of planned care.

The BMA chairman, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, said:

We have a situation where more than 3 million people in England alone are waiting for elective procedures, with many more left in limbo not knowing when they are likely to be seen for what can often be painful and distressing conditions.

Doctors are naturally deeply concerned about these patients, and the government has a duty to the public to be honest about the scale of the backlog and how long it will take to clear - informed by the experiences of clinicians on the ground.

And while the government pledged to give the NHS ‘everything it needed’ to fight the early days of the outbreak in Britain, it must now do the same in ensuring the health service has the capacity to address the growing backlog in care, backed by guaranteed investment.

Updated

From the BBC’s Chris Mason

Sir Lindsay Hoyle is not the only MP using Twitter to flag up the problems his constituents are having getting coronavirus tests. (See 11.12am.) Here are some Labour MPs who have also been speaking out.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, is due in the Commons shortly, where he will have to address these complaints.

'Serious foreign policy error' - Hague joins all but one former Tory leaders in criticising internal market bill

William Hague has written a powerful column (paywall) in today’s Daily Telegraph criticising Boris Johnson’s internal market bill. Hague, a former Conservative party leader and former foreign secretary, says passing a law that would deliberately abrogate an international treaty would be a “serious foreign policy error” that would “have a lasting and damaging effect on our international reputation and standing, diminishing our ability to exert our influence and protect our interests”.

The whole article is about the value of international law. Here are some extracts.

In the four years I spent at the Foreign Office, I doubt there was a single day that I did not rely on international law – the body of treaties, conventions and agreements that we and other nations have signed over the years – in some shape or form. Every time we ask for consular access to a British national held in a foreign prison we are basing our argument on international law, as Dominic Raab has done in the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, held in Iran. Every day that we seek fair treatment for a British company with operations overseas against unfair taxation, or confiscation of assets, or discriminatory exclusion from a domestic market, we refer to international law ....

So international law is not some abstract concept that only comes up occasionally. It matters to British people every hour of every day ...

Yet the concept of international law has also, for Britain, reached far beyond even this day-to-day importance. It has provided the foundation and justification for some of our most momentous decisions as a nation. The declaration of war in 1914 was specifically to uphold a treaty commitment to Belgian neutrality, in contrast to the decision by Germany to regard that as “a scrap of paper” ...

In the event of no deal being reached with the EU, the UK will have particular need of upholding global rules. If some EU members make it difficult for our exports, we will no doubt call to our aid the rules of the World Trade Organisation. And if the fishing boats of other countries intrude into our waters, we will rely on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. All of this is international law, and to set the precedent of breaking it is a very bad idea indeed ...

Whenever I spoke as foreign secretary about the upholding of laws and treaties, to the UN or any errant state, I did so with the utter confidence that my country stood on solid ground. We undermine that ground at our peril.

Hague’s article means that every former leader of the Conservative party alive, apart from one, has spoken out against Johnson’s plans. They are: Sir John Major, Hague, Michael Howard, David Cameron and Theresa May.

The exception is Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who has defended Johnson.

William Hague.
William Hague. Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA

Dominic Cummings was pictured with an archive letter from one of the leading figures of the US missile and space programmes as he entered Downing Street, PA Media reports.

The document, from former US air force general Bernard Schriever, appears to rail against the “blizzard of legislation” around defence procurement and accused the system of “inhibiting technological innovation”.

Cummings is known to have a keen interest in defence spending and has previously hailed Gen Schriever, who died in 2005, as a “phenomenally successful” manager for his work on rapidly deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

As PA Media reports, the letter carried by Cummings was written in 1986 to David Packard, who carried out a review of defence spending for president Ronald Reagan. “I strongly believe that the wise and timely application of technology to provide qualitatively superior weapons, second only to people, is the most important ingredient to our national security,” Gen Schriever said.

Cummings was pictured with the document before a cabinet meeting and while a major defence review is taking place in the UK.

Dominic Cummings in Downing Street this morning.
Dominic Cummings in Downing Street this morning. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex/Shutterstock

Updated

This morning Priti Patel, the home secretary, told the Today programme that if two families of four were to stop for a chat when they met in the street, that would constitute “mingling”, which is illegal under the rule of six legislation. (See 10.27am.)

But the human rights barrister Adam Wagner says she’s wrong. He explains why here.

Priti Patel arriving for cabinet this morning.
Priti Patel arriving for cabinet this morning. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

“Sometimes I think the Welsh government cares more about the union than the UK government does” ... there is “absolutely no trust” left between the UK and Scottish governments … this morning the devolved administrations continued to hammer home their profound concerns about the UK internal market bill, both in terms of specific policy implications and its impact on the concept of devolution.

Giving evidence to the Commons future relationship with the EU committee, Jeremy Miles, the Welsh consul general, and Mike Russell, Holyrood’s Brexit secretary, told MPs they had been excluded from discussions about what they argue are far-reaching changes to the devolution settlement contained in the bill.

Asked about UK government claims that the bill would deliver more powers to Scotland, Russell insisted: “It isn’t true.”

Miles said the bill would “neuter devolution”, warning that it had been “smartly drafted to circumvent” the devolved administrations. He said it would make it “very difficult” to deliver planned policy in Wales on single-use plastics, for example, which would diverge from the rest of the UK, as well as on different policies regarding building standards and waste recycling.

Miles said the Welsh government had put forward its own proposals for compromises, and that the UK government “should engage with those”. He explained that the common frameworks mechanism provides a constructive way of dealing with divergence.

But Russell suggested there was a blatant agenda underlying the legislation: “A fear that devolution will interfere with the kind of trade deal the UK government wants.”

He added that there was a “hostility” to devolution in the current Westminster government, especially among those in favour of Brexit, and warned that the concept had become “clouded and confused in the minds of some people” to be associated with the Scottish National party and independence. “The atmosphere has been poisoned and the current government has poisoned it even more,” he said.

Updated

Commons Speaker says unavailability of Covid tests 'completely unacceptable'

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, has joined MPs speaking out about the unavailability of coronavirus tests. He says that he is receiving “numerous complaints” and that the current situation is “completely unacceptable”.

Although the Speaker is expected to stay neutral in Commons proceedings, he does represent a constituency (Chorley in Lancashire, in Hoyle’s case) and the Speaker is expected to take up complaints on behalf of constituents with ministers, just like any other MP.

Still, it is unusual for the Speaker to go public on an issue like this, particularly one that is a matter of party political dispute. (Yesterday Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said the system hailed by Boris Johnson as world-beating was “not just any shambles [but] now a world-beating shambles”.) Perhaps Hoyle is out to stir things up, but it is more probable that he is just channelling the anger of his constituents.

Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker.
Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/AFP/Getty Images

Updated

Boris Johnson returning to Downing Street after today’s cabinet meeting in the Foreign Office.
Boris Johnson returning to Downing Street after today’s cabinet meeting in the Foreign Office. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Updated

Migrants who have crossed the Channel in small boats are to be housed in military barracks while their asylum claims are processed, PA Media reports. Around 400 people including families are to be housed in temporary accommodation at Napier Barracks in Folkestone, Kent, from next week. They are understood to include migrants who have crossed to the UK in small boats. A barracks in Pembrokeshire, Wales, is also being considered for use by the Home Office, the PA Media reports.

The head of the British Medical Association has urged the government to produce a test-and-trace system that is “fit for purpose”. In an extract from a speech being delivered at today’s BMA annual meeting, its chairman, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, says:

The government is now shooting for the moon promising to deliver mass continuous testing with a test that doesn’t yet exist at a cost nearly as much as the total NHS budget.

Down here on planet Earth, we need a fit-for-purpose test-and-trace system in the here and now with capacity, agility and accessibility that doesn’t require 100-mile journeys that disadvantage some of the most vulnerable.

Updated

'Tests are available,' Patel says

In an interview on BBC Breakfast Priti Patel, the home secretary, claimed it was “wrong to say” that there were no tests available. When asked about the shortage of tests, she said:

Tests are available, you’ve heard me say, particularly in local lockdown areas, I’ve seen this myself, I’ve seen the teams that have been working on this.

Mobile testing is going in, capacity is going into local areas where lockdowns have been undertaken and are taking place.

I think it is wrong to say tests are not available, new book-in slots are being made available every single day, mobile testing units are being made available.

And on top of that home testing kits are being issued across the country but specifically in local lockdown areas.

Here is our overnight story from my colleagues Josh Halliday and Steven Morris about the testing shortage. While clearly it would be wrong to say there were no tests available anywhere for anyone, for many people, in many places, they are unavailable.

Updated

Two families of four chatting in the street would break England’s Covid laws, Patel says

Two families of four stopping for a chat in the street would contravene England’s “rule of six” coronavirus restrictions and constitute mingling, Priti Patel, the home secretary, has said. My colleague Alexandra Topping has the full story here.

Prof Alan McNally, the director of the institute of microbiology and infection at the University of Birmingham, who helped set up the Milton Keynes Lighthouse Lab, told BBC Breakfast there were “clearly underlying issues which nobody wants to tell us about” in relation to why people cannot get coronavirus tests.

He said he had heard from friends working in labs that there were no issues with things such as access to reagents. He went on:

The labs are still fully staffed, they are still churning through huge amounts of samples per day – the same number as they were a couple of months ago – so there are problems elsewhere in the chain.

Clearly what we have now is some underlying issues that no one wants to tell us about ...

The worry is that we are not getting clear information on where the problems are and it seems that there’s been a lack of foresight and planning for this to occur.

Asked about the situation in Birmingham, he said:

I think the testing situation of Birmingham is the exact same as we’re hearing in other parts of the country ... lots of people struggling to get tests and no real quantity of information on why that’s the case.

I think this is multi-factorial. I think you almost have a perfect storm of events that have come together to almost essentially crash the testing system.

I think there is a surge in demand [and] I think our stated capacity is very different from actually how many tests can be run in a given day.

It’s very worrying that we seem to be in a situation before really we’ve come into autumn and winter where we’ve maxed out the number of tests we can do in the country, and that is very concerning.

Updated

Boris Johnson leaving Downing Street this morning to attend the socially distanced cabinet meeting in the Foreign Office.
Boris Johnson leaving Downing Street this morning to attend the socially distanced cabinet meeting in the Foreign Office. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

Only 1% of deaths in England and Wales now linked to Covid, ONS says

Only 1% of deaths in England and Wales in the week ending 4 September involved coronavirus, according to the latest weekly death statistics from the Office for National Statistics. Of the 7,739 deaths registered that week, 78 had Covid mentioned on the death certificate. That is the lowest number of Covid deaths in the last 25 weeks, the ONS says.

Overall deaths in the week ending 4 September were also 15.7% below the five-year average for this time of year, the report says.

Weekly deaths in England and Wales, compared to five-year average
Weekly deaths in England and Wales, compared to five-year average. Photograph: ONS

Updated

The personal data of every Welsh resident who tested positive for Covid-19 between the end of February and 30 August was accidentally uploaded to a public server, where it was searchable by anyone using the site.

Public Health Wales said the data breach, involving the details of 18,105 people, was the result of “individual human error”.

In the cases of 16,179 people, the information published consisted of their initials, date of birth, geographical area and sex.

However, for 1,926 people living in nursing homes or other enclosed settings, such as supported housing, or residents who shared the same postcode as those settings, the information included the name of the setting.

Public Health Wales removed the data on the morning of 31 August after being alerted to the breach. In the 20 hours it was online, it was viewed 56 times. It has not been possible to trace the people who viewed it.

A spokesman said there was “no evidence at this stage” that the data had been misused. The data was for every Welsh resident who tested positive for Covid-19 between the 27 February and 30 August.

Updated

In the light of Sir John Bell’s comment about how the second wave has arrived (see 9.20am), it is worth flagging up the last graph from the government’s coronavirus dashboard showing the pattern for new cases. It was only published at about 6.30pm yesterday, later than usual.

Coronavirus case numbers.
Coronavirus case numbers. Photograph: gov.uk

In some respects this illustration is misleading because the two peaks are not like for like. In March and April very little testing was taking place, and so the 5,000 cases a day figure only represented a tiny fraction of the actual level of infection in the community. Now the daily figure captures a much larger chunk of actual infections (although, according to a report (pdf) from the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, the proportion of people in England with Covid symptoms getting a test could still be as low as 10%.) Death figures are not going up yet, and hospital admission figures have only just started creeping up. But this chart shows why the “second wave” tag applies.

Updated

'Second wave has arrived' and covid testing capacity 'behind the curve', government adviser says

Good morning. Boris Johnson won his first vote on the internal market bill very easily last night, but the morning papers won’t bring him much comfort because several are focusing on the coronavirus testing crisis, with large numbers of people continuing to report that they cannot get a test.

On the Today programme Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and a government adviser on life sciences, said the government was “behind the curve” in providing testing capacity.

Asked what was going wrong, he replied:

I think what’s going wrong is the second wave. A month ago they had spare capacity in testing – significant spare capacity – but I think what has been underestimated was the speed at which the second wave would arrive, but also the pressure put on the system from children returning to school, and the testing demands associated with that, and people increasingly out and about.

So, I think they are definitely behind the curve in terms of getting the necessary tests for what we need today.

Bell said there would be a “significant increase” in testing capacity over the next two weeks. But demand was rising too, he said.

This will get worse because of course we haven’t hit winter yet – we haven’t all started to sniffle, get fevers, get colds, and that’s going to add additional confusion to the problem. The demand will go up. The real question is whether they can get supply in a position where it can outpace demand, and that’s the challenge at the moment.

On the same programme Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents hospitals and other NHS trusts, said the government was not being open enough with health leaders about the scale of the problem. He said:

Part of the problem here is that the government isn’t being as open as trusts would like about how big this problem is, how widespread it is, and how long it’s going to last. So, it’s difficult to get full information.

He also suggested that the government was focusing too much on spin.

Governments, when they get operational problems like this, face a choice, which is do they try and politically communicate their way out of them – say, for example, ‘look how many million tests we’ve done’, or ‘we’re going to do a very ambitious moonshot next year’ – or do they calmly and soberly explain the appropriate detail of what’s going on, and in doing that help and support those organisations ... who are trying to deal with these problems. And I suppose there’s a pretty clear view from our trust leaders that they really want rather less of the former and rather more of the latter.

When it was put to him that he was saying there was too much spin and not enough real information coming out of government, he replied: “That’s certainly one way of putting it, yes.”

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Boris Johnson chairs cabinet.

9.30am: The ONS publishes its weekly death statistics for England and Wales.

11am: Sir Keir Starmer gives a speech to the Trades Union Congress’s online conference.

12pm: The Department for Education publishes school attendance figures.

12pm: Downing Street is due to hold its daily lobby briefing.

12.15pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, is holding her regular coronavirus briefing.

12.30pm: Matt Hancock, the health secretary, is due to answer an urgent question on coronavirus in the Commons.

Around 2pm: MPs start the first committee stage debate on the internal market bill. They will debate amendments relating to the functioning of the UK internal market.

2.30pm: David Nabarro, a WHO special envoy on coronavirus, gives evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee.

Politics Live has been doubling up as the UK coronavirus live blog for some time and, given the way the Covid crisis eclipses everything, this will continue for the foreseeable future. But we will be covering non-Covid political stories too, and where they seem more important and interesting, they will take precedence.

Here is our global coronavirus live blog.

I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

Updated

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Jim Carrey 2026 Conspiracy Theory: Who Is Alexis Stone? Drag Performer Says He 'Performed' the Actor in Paris
UK drag performer Alexis Stone claims to have impersonated Jim Carrey at the César Awards, sparking social media debate.
International Business Times UK
International Business Times UK
Zendaya Pregnancy Rumors Resurface as Secret Marriage Leaks—Is This the Real Reason for Tying the Knot?
Zendaya pregnancy rumours return amid news of a hidden marriage, leaving fans eager for confirmation from the couple.
International Business Times UK
International Business Times UK
Jim Carrey Theories Reach New Heights After Drag Queen Reveals Mask He Wore To Pose As The Actor
“How much they pay you to try and close this theory up?”
Bored Panda
Bored Panda
Strong opinions matter: Why some birds refuse to follow the flock
We like to think that animals, including humans, follow the crowd. Think of a flock of pigeons taking off from the city square together or the recent frenzy over labubus. If most of the group does something, surely the individual will copy.
The Conversation
The Conversation
‘You know when you’ve hit it – it’s a transformation’: Ruth E Carter on building the bold world of Sinners
The two-time Oscar winner on dressing Michael B Jordan’s twin antiheroes, her start with Spike Lee and crafting the period detail of Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending epic
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Zendaya and Tom Holland are married, stylist Law Roach claims at Actor Awards
Couple’s engagement was confirmed in early 2025
The Independent UK
The Independent UK
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.
Download on the AppStore Get it on Google Play