UK politics news – live: Keir Starmer ahead of Boris Johnson in fresh poll, as CBI chief issues no-deal Brexit warning
Health secretary Matt Hancock has said he is "confident" the government's coronavirus test-and-trace scheme will be world-class eventually, after the system's head admitted it was “not yet at the gold standard” as figures from its first week revealed a third of people testing positive could not be reached.
Amid warnings that the corresponding app will not be ready for use in tower blocks until at least the autumn due to the potential for “inaccurate readings”, Baroness Dido Harding described the app as the cherry on the cake but “not the cake itself”, adding: “What you are seeing today is the first baking of the cake is going reasonably well.”
The warning came as Boris Johnson told ministers he wanted to scrap the social distancing two-metre rule within weeks so schools can fully reopen for the new academic year, amid growing Tory insistence, in a bid to prevent further damage to the economy.
Boris Johnson ‘to scrap two-metre distancing rule by September at the latest in bid to fully reopen schools’
Mr Johnson has told ministers he wants to change the rule within weeks, possibly to bring the UK into line with World Health Organisation guidelines advising people keep a distance of one metre, according to The Telegraph.
The news comes after the government’s chief scientific officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, suggested the two-metre social distancing measures were not a hard and fast “scientific rule”, Tom Barnes reports.
“It is wrong to portray this as a scientific rule that says it is two metres or nothing - that is not what the advice has been and it is not what the advice is now,” Sir Patrick said at the Downing Street briefing.
Mr Johnson says he wants all pupils back in classrooms by September, after abandoning plans to get more primary school children back in class before England’s summer break - admitting the government had been forced to move “slower than we would have liked in some areas”.
Meanwhile, the prime minister is also under increasing pressure from his own MPs to scrap the two-metre rule in order to prevent further damage to the economy. Mr Johnson “instinctively” wants to relax guidelines, but is concerned about a potential second wave of coronavirus, the Daily Mail reported.
Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith told the Mail reducing the two-metre rule to one metre was the “single most important priority to unlock the economy.”
Lockdown one week earlier could have halved UK's death toll, says Neil Ferguson
Boris Johnson refused to say whether he regretted not going into lockdown earlier in March during the Downing Street press conference, saying it was “premature” to make judgements while the pandemic was ongoing, Lizzy Buchan reports.
But Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, admitted that failure to rapidly begin widespread testing was the top of “a long list” of his regrets about the UK response. He said scientific advisers were “always looking back” in order to learn lessons as events unfolded.
Prof Ferguson, who resigned from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) in May for breaching lockdown rules, made the extraordinary comments following questions from MPs over why the UK death toll was far higher than the original predictions.
He told the Commons Science and Technology Committee: “We knew the epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced.
“So had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.
"So whilst I think the measures, given what we knew about this virus then in terms of its transmission and fatality, were warranted, certainly had we introduced them earlier we would have seen many fewer deaths.”
Minister says UK has world's second-highest death toll because 'we are a global travel hub'
Britain has suffered far more coronavirus deaths than other nations because it receives so many international travellers, a government minister claims.
Simon Clarke hit back at growing criticism that the lockdown came too late – leading to 50,000 people losing their lives – by arguing it was explained by the UK's unique vulnerability.
“The truth is that Britain was always going to be hugely exposed to this virus because of some the features of our society,” the local government minister said.
“We are a global travel hub - we were always going to face big challenges.”
However, Mr Clarke rejected a suggestion that was further proof that strict quarantine rules should have been imposed in March, instead of only in mid-June.
North Macedonia fines more than 1,000 people for not wearing masks within 24 hours
North Macedonia has recorded its highest number of coronavirus deaths in more than a month, as authorities warned that citizens were ignoring warnings to wear masks and to observe social distancing.
Some 125 new infections and seven deaths in the past 24 hours were recorded overnight, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country of about 2.1 million people to 3,364, including 164 deaths.
Health authorities said that the new spike is related to mass gatherings three weeks ago, during the celebrations of religious holidays, particularly in the capital of Skopje and three other regions.
The government says new movement restrictions are unnecessary but it ordered police to be strict in enforcing remaining controls and to issue fines, when merited. Police fined a total 1,143 people in 24 hours who were found without protective masks on Wednesday.
Health services in the worst-hit cities of Mumbai, New Delhi and Chennai have become swamped by the rising infections, as India's tally reaches 286,579 confirmed cases - the fifth highest in the world, with 8,102 deaths.
The spike comes as the government moved ahead with the reopening of restaurants, shopping malls and places of worship in most of India after lockdown of more than two months. Subways, hotels and schools remain closed.
The actual infection numbers are thought to be higher because of limited testing, capacity for which the health ministry says it is ramping up with more than 145,000 daily tests.
The government also said that the total number of recovered patients has exceeded the active cases for the first time with the recovery rate of nearly 49 per cent.
Ofsted calls for more 'can do' approach to reopening schools
Chief inspector of schools Amanda Spielman told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I would like to hear a much more optimistic approach. I think it should be about what we can do, not about what we can't do."
She added: "Many schools are already showing that within the public health guidance that sets the expectation for these bubbles of 15 children there's a great deal that can be done.
"It is also important to remember that within the bubbles social distancing is an aspiration, not an absolute expectation."
"The risk to children themselves is very low indeed and those in education should take some confidence from that. It's about starting from the position of seeing what can we create, how far we can go?"
Keir Starmer accuses government of risking both 'welfare and education' of children
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, writing in The Telegraph, said the issues facing Downing Street on ensuring pupils were safe to return to classrooms were "entirely foreseeable" and criticised the PM for failing to meet with opposition parties to put together a plan, saying: "There was no plan, no consensus, no leadership."
"We now have the ridiculous situation where next week betting shops and theme parks will open, but parents are not clear when their children will go back to school," he said.
"The longer schools are shut, the greater the damage to children's wellbeing and education and the increasing pressure on parents who are having to juggle childcare and work commitments.
"The warning from the Children's Commissioner a few days ago could not have been starker: a generation of children now risk losing out on over six months of education."
The criticisms come after Sir Keir told Boris Johnson at PMQs that parents had "lost confidence" in the government's schools plan and warned that millions of children could miss six months' worth of education.
At yesterday's Downing Street briefing, Mr Johnson said school pupils would undergo a "massive catch-up operation over the summer and beyond" to get up to speed on work they have missed. He said details of the catch-up plans will be outlined by education secretary Gavin Williamson next week.
Here's a couple of pieces of analysis on the new "support bubble rules announced by Boris Johnson yesterday.
Olivia Petter has more details on what the rules mean for single people, and reports that couples will be able to stay the night at each other's homes, so long as one of you lives alone or just with children.
It’s not yet clear how the new rule will affect the laws in England that made it illegal for couples living apart to have sex indoors. Presumably, it will still be illegal for couples who both live with other adults. But the new rule overrides this law for couples where one person lives alone.
Meanwhile, our home affairs correspondent Lizzie Dearden looks at the new rules from a legal perspective, and writes that these changes come on top of three separate sets of overlapping coronavirus laws.
Russia has reported 8,779 new cases, bringing its nationwide infection tally to 502,436.
Officials said 174 people had died in the last 24 hours, bringing the official death toll to 6,532.
Russia has denied actively underreporting deaths, but as with many countries, including the UK, the number of excess deaths recorded, in Moscow at least, is far higher than the official number of people reported to have died with coronavirus.
Patients face diagnosis delays as hospitals struggle with surge in screenings
Hospitals are not equipped to deal with the surge in screenings and tests as the health service restarts care – leaving patients facing delays in diagnosis and treatment for conditions including cancer, according to medical leaders, our health correspondent Shaun Lintern reveals.
As the NHS tries to recover from the worst of the coronavirus crisis, more than a million laboratory samples from cancer screening services are expected in pathology labs, while as many as 850,000 delayed CT and MRI scans need to be carried out.
But 97 per cent of labs do not have enough pathologists to carry out the work – with staff already working unpaid hours to tackle the existing backlog – while the number of radiology posts nationally would need to be increased by a third to deal with the rise, experts say. Precautions to protect against the spread of coronavirus also limits the number of scans that can be carried out. The royal colleges of pathologists and radiologists warned that cancers would go undiagnosed and treatments for all patients across the NHS could be further delayed as a result.
Read his special report funded by supporters' donations here:
'We are repeating the same mistakes now': Scientific adviser rejects PM's insistence it is 'too early to judge ourselves'
Stephen Reicher, a University of St Andrew's social psychologist on the Sage subcommittee for behavioural science, has urged those in power to urgently assess their mistakes to avoid repeating them throughout the pandemic.
It comes after Boris Johnson claimed it was "simply too early to judge ourselves", refusing to say whether he had any regrets over his government's handling of the pandemic.
In contrast, England's chief medical officer said that the PM's scientific advisers would not wait until the end of the outbreak to work out what had been done badly or well, but are "always looking back" in order to learn lessons as events unfolded.
Chris Whitty said the failure to quickly ramp up widespread testing was at the top of a "long list" of regrets, saying: "Many of the problems that we had came because we were unable to actually work out exactly where we were, and we were trying to sort of see our way through the fog with more difficulty."
Read Andrew Woodcock's full report on yesterday's remarks here:
Our friends at Statista have created this graph of GDP forecasts in a scenario in which there is no "second wave" of coronavirus, based on the latest data from the OECD.
The UK is expected to face the deepest recession of any major economy, as shown by the below graph. Statista/The Independent
Our business correspondent Ben Chapman has more on the damning forecasts here:
‘We cannot rule out further job reductions,’ Heathrow chief executive says
Britain’s busiest airport is blaming the government for prolonging “grim” results of the coronavirus pandemic, our veteran travel correspondent Simon Calder reports.
Heathrow airport has reported passenger numbers in May “at an all-time low,” down 97 per cent compared with the same month in 2019. The west London hub has warned that its employment levels are “no longer sustainable” because of the government’s new policy mandating 14 days of self-isolation for arriving travellers.
“In line with this decline, the airport has begun to restructure its frontline roles, having already cut one-third of managerial roles,” it said in a statement.
'No surprise' governments reluctant to implement lockdown, Scottish Government adviser says
Asked if he believed the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) got it wrong about lockdown timings, Professor Mark Woolhouse, of Edinburgh University, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "No, I don't. I'm not on Sage, so I can't speak for the processes that led to that advice.
"The timing of an intervention for an epidemic like this is extremely complicated. Lockdown is a very drastic measure, so it is no surprise that governments around the world have been very reluctant to implement it."
He added: "The problem is, from my point of view, the scientific advice - and this comes all the way back to the World Health Organisation - is the only option we are giving our governments in lockdown. That is an extremely crude way to deal with an epidemic of this nature."
The numbers – revealed in a Freedom of Information request (FoI) – cover all of the seven sites built to help the country deal with the coronavirus outbreak, Zoe Tidman reports.
However, some of these field hospitals have not taken in a Covid-19 patient to date, according to the Health Service Journal (HSJ).
Responding to an FoI request into the cost of these critical care hospitals, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said the total set-up cost for the seven sites was about £220m, according to estimates provided by the NHS.
Running costs in April were around £15m, the health ministry said.
PM's former ally turns on him over coronavirus strategy
Founder of the ConservativeHome website and former Downing Street adviser, Tim Montgomerie, has rounded on the prime minister over his government's handling of the coronavirus crisis.
He prefaced the critique in the New Statesman by tweeting: "I didn’t want to write this but all private warnings and advice went unheeded and all the problems of centralisation and arrogance remain...
"What has gone wrong inside Boris Johnson’s government and can it be put right?"
Government asked why it chose 'overwhelmingly white' Isle of Wight for app trial
Labour MP Afzal Khan has pressed the government over why it chose the Isle of Wight for a trial of the NHS contact tracing app, having raised concerns that black and minority ethnic communities have been disproportionately impacted by the virus.
Addressing Michael Gove, he said: "Given that we have known for months about the disproportionate impact of coronavirus on BME communities across the UK, I'm confused as to why the government chose to trial the NHS contact tracing app on Isle of Wight - an island with an overwhelmingly white population.
"We know that BME communities are less likely to trust the app due to their experiences of discriminatory policing and there is potential for existing biases to be amplified."
He added: "With this in mind, does [Mr Gove] still think the Isle of Wight was the right place to trial this app?"
Mr Gove responded: "The Isle of Wight was an appropriate place in which to trial the app because by definition, trialling it in a geographically secure, as it were, community was one way of making sure that we could conduct that trial in an effective way and in a way which allowed us to learn lessons rapidly.
"Trialing the app in different parts of the United Kingdom would have posed significant challenges."
Tory minister gives open response to calls for reduction of two-metre rule
Tory MP Sir Desmond Swayne has added to largely Conservative calls for the two-metre social distance rule to be reduced, telling MPs in the Commons: "Avoid a damaging second spike to our economy - isn't a yard more than sufficient?"
Penny Mordaunt replied: "Well we are determined to get the UK economy up and running again including the hospitality sector and our schools reopened.
"Research published in The Lancet last week showed that a physical distance of at least one metre, or if Sir Desmond insists, 1.09 yards, is strongly associated with a lower risk of transmission but a distance of two metres was likely to be more effective.
"So the advice remains that, wherever possible, the public should keep two metres from one another. But Sage are of course keeping this under review."
It comes after reports indicated that Boris Johnson is strongly in favour of scrapping the rule:
