New restrictions for our friends in the north

By Gareth Jones, Public Affairs

Residents in the north-east of England will be subject to tough new coronavirus restrictions from tomorrow, as Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced new temporary measures will be in place due to "concerning rates of infection".

These measures will affect nearly 2 million people, covering Newcastle, Northumberland, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Gateshead, County Durham and Sunderland – and mean they will be unable to socialise with individuals outside of their household or support bubble. Pubs, restaurants and other hospitality outlets will be forced to operate under a curfew of 10pm to 5am and will be restricted to table service only. Workplaces and schools will remain open, with Newcastle City Council leader Nick Forbes hopeful that these temporary measures would "head off the potential of any further damaging full lockdown across the region"

The north-east is the latest part of the UK to be impacted by local restrictions – following Leicester, Birmingham, Greater Manchester, East Lancashire, Bradford and others. In yesterday’s liaison committee, Boris Johnson said that a second lockdown would be 'disastrous' for UK. However, it could be argued that across large parts of the country, we are, already in some form a second lockdown, with approximately 10 million people currently under temporary new restrictions. 

All this has added more pressure on the government to address current issues on testing. Dido Harding, head of the NHS Test and Trace programme, appeared in front of the House of Commons science committee today to answer questions about the lack of available tests and why so many are taking longer than 24 hours to process. She told the committee that the recent sizeable increase in demand was unexpected and that they made a conscious decision to extend the turnaround times for processing results because of the huge increase in demand. Those admissions are unlikely to ease pressure on the government – and neither will Jacob Rees-Mogg’s statement in the House, where he said that people speaking out about the difficulty of getting a Covid test should stop the “endless carping”. The government has, however, said it is now "very confident" of raising capacity to 500,000 tests a day by the end of October