Boris Johnson’s Mistress Jennifer Arcuri is coming back to live in England in 2020. She will be appearing on Channel Four’s Celebrity Hunted programme no doubt to tease the nation will a kiss and tell on Johnson’s peccadillos. She promised a tell all book on her time with Boris Johnson from 2011 to 2016 but instead delivers a book on Hacking.

American Arcuri is a self promoting actress and a hackivist, no bimbo but highly intelligent who shared Johnson’s Secrets during the crucial period of Russian Influence in the run up to the 2016 Brexit Referendum. ……..

Young people in Preston have been warned “don’t kill granny” by the city’s council as local lockdown measures were enforced following a spike in coronavirus cases.

Households in the city in Lancashire are now banned from mixing indoors or in gardens, with local leaders blaming people mixing in pubs and other homes for restrictions having to be reimposed.

Adrian Phillips, chief executive of Preston City Council, said “young people are inevitably among the brave and the bold”, but claimed they are spreading COVID-19 in the community in “many cases”

“I know our director of public health has said ‘don’t kill granny’ to young people to try and focus the message,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme.

“Young people are inevitably among the brave and the bold, they want to be adventurous and out and about, but we know that they have the virus… they often have less symptoms, but they do take it back to their household and the community spread we are seeing, we believe in many cases (is) young people taking it home and catching the virus.”

Mr Phillips backed a call from the Local Government Association (LGA) for councils to have greater powers to close pubs to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Current guidance says licensed premises should take customer details and ensure they have infection control measures in place, but they are still voluntary.

The LGA wants these guidelines to be made mandatory immediately, and has called for local authorities to be given stronger powers to enforce them.

It wants a temporary COVID-19 objective added to the Licensing Act, allowing councils to shut premises that fail to collect contact tracing data or enforce social distancing, or even revoke their licences.

“You need responsive powers,” Mr Phillips said.

“It is useful to have something that can move quickly and we can make it entirely clear to the licensee or the operator what the consequences are.”

The new restrictions in Preston that came into place from midnight are:

• You cannot have others in your homes and gardens
• You cannot visit other people’s homes or gardens, even if they are in an unaffected area
• You are not permitted to mix with other household in indoor venues

Social bubbles are exempt from the restrictions.

Residents can meet in groups of up to six, or more than six if exclusively from two households, in outdoor areas such as parks and beer gardens.

Households can also visit indoor hospitality venues as long as they do not mix with others.

Sixty-one new coronavirus cases were reported in Preston in the seven days to August 4, which is the equivalent of 42.6 cases per 100,000 people – up from 21.7 per 100,000 in the previous seven days.

Director of Public Health for Lancashire Sakthi Karunanithi said almost half of the cases reported were among people aged 30 and younger.

Mr Karunanithi said the “two main reasons” for the rise in infections were people meeting others in their houses and households coming together in venues such as pubs.

He added: “These two are key behaviours we’re trying to protect people from. Don’t meet with members of other households in pubs and clubs.”

The new restrictions in Preston come a week after the same measures were brought in for residents in Greater Manchester, parts of east Lancashire and West Yorkshire, as well as Leicester.

The rules will remain in place for those areas for at least another week.

Bedford and Swindon have also been added to the government’s “watchlist” of places where cases are rising.

Meanwhile, from today face coverings are now mandatory across England in indoor places of worship, museums and galleries, public areas in hotels and hostels, bingo halls, libraries, cinemas, concert halls, crematoriums, aquariums and indoor zoos.

This week came word of at least £156m of taxpayers’ money wasted on 50 million face masks deemed unsuitable for the NHS. They were bought from a private equity firm through a company that had no track record of producing personal protective equipment – or indeed anything for that matter – and that had a share capital of just £100. But this company, Prospermill, had a crucial asset. It was co-owned by one Andrew Mills, adviser to the government, staunch Brexiteer and cheerleader for international trade secretary, Liz Truss.

Somehow Prospermill managed to persuade the government to part with £252m, boasting that it had secured exclusive rights over a PPE factory in China. Just one problem. The masks it produced use ear loops, when only masks tied at the head are judged by the government to be suitable for NHS staff. If the government wanted to spend £156m on masks for the nation’s kids to play doctors and nurses, this was a great deal. But in the fight against a pandemic, it was useless.

All this has come to light thanks to the Good Law Project, which is challenging through the courts what it calls “the government’s £15bn supermarket sweep approach to PPE procurement”. As if to remind us of the necessity of judicial review – a process now threatened with “reform” by this government – the group have initiated such proceedings over several deals with suppliers with no conspicuous experience or expertise in PPE, including a pest controller and a confectionery wholesaler. But this latest one is the biggest.

I asked Jolyon Maugham, who runs the project, whether what he had seen amounted to corruption. He doesn’t use that word himself, preferring to note that “mutual back-scratching” tends to be how it works in this country. “You have contracts awarded to the wrong people because of incompetence, and you have contracts awarded to the wrong people because the wrong people knew what ears to whisper into.”

Such whispers are becoming the background noise of this government. This week the housing secretary Robert Jenrick was asked about his encounter with Richard Desmond at a Tory fundraising dinner last November, at which Desmond showed the cabinet minister a video of the housing development he wanted to build. Jenrick said he wished he “hadn’t been sat next to a developer at an event and I regret sharing text messages with him afterwards”, which rather glossed over the key fact: namely, that Jenrick promptly rushed through a decision on the project, the speed of which allowed Desmond’s company to avoid paying roughly £40m in tax to the local council. That move was later designated “unlawful”, and Jenrick was forced to overturn his decision.

It would be nice to think that episode was a one-off, but it’s hard to do so when developers have given £11m in donations to the Conservatives since Johnson arrived in Downing Street just one year ago.

One can hardly blame entrepreneurs and go-getters for wanting to get cosy with Johnson’s ministers. They see how business is done. They’ve noticed the seven government contracts together worth nearly £1m that were awarded in the course of 18 months to a single artificial intelligence startup, an outfit that just so happened to have worked for Dominic Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign.

The company is called Faculty and, handily, the government minister tasked with promoting the use of digital technology, Theodore Agnew, has a £90,000 shareholding in it. Any suggestion of a conflict of interest is breezily brushed aside. More conveniently still, Faculty’s chief executive, Marc Warner, has attended at least one meeting of Sage, the scientists’ group advising the government on coronavirus. Better yet Warner’s brother, Ben, works at Downing Street as a data scientist and has been a regular at Sage where, as one attendee put it to the Guardian, he “behaved as Cummings’ deputy”. Faculty insists all “the proper processes” have been followed in the awarding of their contracts.

Meanwhile, a political consultancy firm with strong ties to both Cummings and Michael Gove managed to win an £840,000 contract without any open tendering process at all. Public First is a small research company, but it is run by James Frayn, an anti-EU comrade of Cummings going back two decades, and his wife Rachel Wolf, the former Gove adviser who co-wrote the Tory manifesto for last year’s election. The government says it could skip the competitive tendering stage because emergency regulations applied, thanks to Covid. Except the government itself recorded some of Public First’s work as related to Brexit (it now says this was an accounting anomaly and that all the work related to the pandemic).

To confirm the new order, you might take a look at the prime minister’s list of nominations to the House of Lords. Besides his brother Jo, you’ll also spot former advisers, donors, Brexiters, and longtime Johnson pal Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian-born billionaire owner of London’s Evening Standard. It’s all terribly cosy. “It’s a pattern of appointing your mates, that’s the common thread,” says Labour’s Rachel Reeves. When fighting a pandemic, you don’t want “contracts for contacts”, she says; you want to look for “the best people, not whether they voted leave or made donations”.

Why is the government behaving this way? An obvious explanation is the 80-seat majority it won in December. The knowledge that parliamentary defeat is a distant prospect, and that you will not face the voters for four long years, can translate into complacency, even a sense of impunity. Johnson’s sparing of Cummings and Jenrick, when a more fragile prime minister would surely have felt compelled to fire them both, has emboldened those individuals and their watching colleagues. They’re not about to start shooting people on Fifth Avenue, as Trump once boasted, but like the US president, they believe they can get away with anything.

That fits with the credo Johnson and Cummings had even before they bagged their majority. Johnson was hardly a stickler for probity to start with; his attitude to the rules, grandly branded a libertarian philosophy by his pals, has long been elastic, at least when it comes to himself and those around him. As for Cummings, his breach of the lockdown during the pandemic’s most grave phase leaves no doubt: he sees the rules as applying to lesser mortals, not him.

This week, research published in the Lancet proved how devastating “the Cummings effect” has been for public faith in the government’s handling of the pandemic. Through their cronyism, their cavalier disregard for basic propriety, Johnson and his circle are draining trust at a time when it is essential to the public health. One day that will matter for the Conservatives’ political fortunes. But it matters for the rest of us right now.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

• The Scott Trust, the ultimate owner of the Guardian, is the sole investor in GMG Ventures, which is a minority shareholder in Faculty

They were billed by the UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, as “lifesaving” and “hugely beneficial”: two new coronavirus tests that claim to deliver results within 90 minutes, promoted enthusiastically to the public with the help of front pages in the Times, the i and the Daily Mail, which declared they would “transform the war on corona”.

The suppliers are little known, evaluation data is not yet available, and it is unclear how effective the tests are outside hospital settings, not least because taking blood or swabs is difficult for non-medics.

But it is an infectious optimism that is hard to shake: during the dismal and downright frightening fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, upbeat scientific or medical claims have been made by politicians and taken up the media, few of which have been borne out to the degree or timeline originally mooted.

There may be moments when hype is justified, but the reality, say experts, is that the crisis constitutes a long hard slog in which ordering people to stay indoors and shutting down the economy has had more impact than any medical or technological advance so far.

Some blame politicians for being a little too eager to leap on positive stories in a time of crisis, with the boosterish health secretary often appearing particularly keen. It was Hancock who claimed a contact-tracing app would be ready in England in mid-May. “NHS phone app holds key to lifting lockdown” said one Sunday paper splash in April. That app is yet to arrive, with the original version scrapped entirely.

Then there was the 100,000-a-day test target, described as “Matt’s target” – though allies of Hancock say the principal aim was to concentrate minds on increasing tests. The figure was met briefly at the end of May before falling again. Yet within days the declared target rose to 200,000, and last month to 500,000 a day. The reality? The UK is processing about 170,000 daily tests on average, far lower than some other countries.

But the problem of over-promising and hype flows from the top.

Boris Johnson repeatedly promised to bring forward “world-class” and “world-beating” systems to tackle Covid-19 – most notably for testing and contact tracing by the beginning of June, a system that is sufficiently patchy that this week Blackburn with Darwen council had to launch its own.

Officials, too, have succumbed. Prof Sharon Peacock, director of the national infection service at Public Health England, said in March that mass antibody testing would “absolutely” be available within days. Ministers had bought 3.5m of the tests but a fortnight later had to admit they did not work.

Why does the reality so often fail to match the promises and breathless PR?

Alex Thomas, a former civil servant and private secretary to the late cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood, said: “While there is a natural optimism bias in all of us, this government has a tendency to be more comfortable about talking about the sunlit uplands, and that inevitably feeds through.”

Some scientists bemoan cutbacks in scientific advice to government over the past decade and an absence of public health specialists among the most senior scientific advisers, saying they weaken the system and the ability to deliver on abstract aims.

There are also criticisms that the UK has become, in the words of one scientist, “far too disengaged from Europe and globally”, and that there remains a lingering sense of British exceptionalism. In April, Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer for England, claimed the UK was “an international exemplar in preparedness” as the death toll was soaring. England ended up with the highest excess deaths in Europe.

An emerging low-level nationalism endemic in media coverage as well as politics focuses intensely on British knowhow and developments, in the fashion of a major sporting event – whether in the much-vaunted attempt by Dyson to build ventilators for Britain, which ultimately collapsed amid lack of need, or in the focus on UK progress in developing a vaccine, while coverage of foreign efforts is more muted.

As well as ministers’ desire to emphasise the upside – likely a mixture of spin and natural, even desperate, optimism – scientists and researchers are under intense pressure to succeed in research, generate good publicity and win additional funding.

The result, says Martin McKee, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Research, is an increase in “wishful thinking”. The academic points to research published four years ago that showed a dramatic increase in the use of positive language such as “robust”, “novel”, and “unprecedented”, in papers published between 1974 and 2014.

Compounding the problem is the sheer complexity of coronavirus virology, which often runs up against simplistic public understandings of science. Prof Deenan Pillay, a virologist at University College London, argues the usefulness of antibody tests has been misunderstood.

The problem, he says, is that after infection “the level of antibodies goes up, but then they come down”, adding: “There was this idea that if you tested positive, you were a superman, immune for life, but that’s not true. It turned out to be hype.”

As a result, related ideas for immunity passports that could let some people return to near normal lives – and these made a splash in the Guardian – were talked up as a possibility by Hancock but did not ultimately come to fruition. The latest evidence lends further credence to the possibility that antibodies drop off significantly within weeks.

Excitement about a vaccine is understandable – in particular Oxford University’s, whose initial trials generated wall-to-wall media coverage last month. “Vaccine for Christmas,” reported the Daily Mail and others, although the university had previously said it could be ready by September, a date set to be quietly missed.

But again Pillay cautions over expectations out of kilter with reality. “We have unrealistic expectations of what a vaccine might do – one or two shots and you are immune. But maybe it will be more like flu where you need a shot every year, the vaccine is only 70% effective and flu is still with us.”

The senior scientist says such over-optimism is not unique to the pandemic, but it has been brought into sharp relief by the intensity of the crisis and the dominance of the story in the news.

“There has long been a glorifying and over-emphasising of scientific advances – and it’s been increasing over time. In a way, everyone’s to blame, from scientists, politicians, investors [to] the media,” he said.

The sentiment was repeated by other residents across the counties.

Toni Potter, 59, a gallery assistant who has lived in St Ives for 32 years, said that she did her food shopping in town at 7am “then I don’t go back”. She added: “We do want tourists but this is so extreme.”

Devon has the lowest Covid-19 death rate in England (21.8 deaths per 100,000 people) while Cornwall & Isles of Scilly has the fourth lowest (27.1 per 100,000).

Out of 182 areas in England, Scotland and Wales, Cornwall ranks 175th for infection levels (with 162 cases per 100,000 of the population) and Devon 176th (155 per 100,000). The only places in England with a lower infection rate are Dorset and North East Lincolnshire. Despite local fears, Devon and Cornwall have so far had only a very slight increase in recorded cases at the end of last month, with the daily average rising to three from about two.

Many holidaymakers were enjoying ice creams along the promenade at St Ives on Thursday while pubs and restaurants were doing a brisk trade.

However, Scott Stevens, 48, a construction company owner from Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, visiting with his wife, told The Times: “It’s not a relaxing holiday at all. It’s uncomfortable. You have to book everything three weeks in advance and there are no tables available in the restaurants.”

Tensions between locals and tourists have boiled over on occasions. A man was arrested on suspicion of assault last week for allegedly attacking two lifeboat volunteers in St Ives when they asked a driver parked in a space reserved for them to move his car.

A 14-year-old boy was attacked with a bottle on Perranporth beach, in north Cornwall, last month after asking tourists to pick up the plastic cups they had dropped. Police said that the suspects, who have not been caught, had “London accents”.

In the sailing harbour of Fowey, on the south coast of Cornwall, the pasty shops have been proving popular and the second-home owners have been staying longer.

Justine Hambly, 51, who runs Any Old Lights, an interior design shop, said that visitor numbers were on a par with Regatta Week, adding: “I think people could be more respectful of the rules. I don’t think it’s through unpleasantness, they just come on holiday and go into a completely different mode. People aren’t wearing masks or keeping their distance.”

Holly Lovelock, 21, an assistant at the Seasalt clothes shop, said that the beaches were so “incredibly packed” that she would avoid them until after summer.

As businesses less affected by social distancing make hay while the sun shines, places such as pubs and clothes shops are struggling to recoup income lost in lockdown.

Carol Tambling, landlady of the Lugger pub in Fowey, said: “We can only book so many people in for food. We missed Easter, we are missing Regatta Week and the Christmas market is looking like it will get cancelled.”

Salcombe, on the south coast of Devon, has been disturbed by unprecedented levels of antisocial behaviour and litter.

Jeff Gillard, 42, an ambulance medic, said that the town has resembled a “war zone” of broken glasses and takeaway boxes most mornings. “I wouldn’t say the numbers of people are hugely different, it just seems to be a different type of visitor,” he said. “The middle of Salcombe feels like a bit of a no-go zone from 10pm.”

Anthony Mangnall, the Conservative MP for Totnes, has promised “more police will be on the streets this weekend to deal with antisocial behaviour”.

The beaches of north Cornwall have been the busiest that many RNLI lifeguards can remember, with 14,000 counted at Perranporth in one day last week.

Tommy Job, 30, of the Watering Hole pub on the beach, said that antisocial behaviour had been worse in lockdown: “People were having big parties . . . now things are back to more normal. I think some locals have a chip on their shoulder because they had the place to themselves for a while. It always gets busy, it’s nothing abnormal.”

The Metropolitan police is facing fresh calls to investigate Dominic Cummings’ decision to leave London for Durham at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

The calls come after the Guardian and the Daily Mirror revealed that Dave and Clare Edwards, two of four people who claim to have seen Cummings on 19 April, have complained to the police watchdog, accusing the Durham force of not fully investigating their claims.

Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the public accounts committee, said: “There is also more evidence now that the police should look into, Durham police and, given the alleged travel from London, the Met police too.”

Under questioning from Hillier at the liaison committee in May, Boris Johnson said he had seen evidence that proves his chief adviser did not make a second trip to Durham in April, as four witness have now claimed. But he refused to agree to release it to the cabinet secretary for independent verification.

Cummings previously claimed that an allegation that he was in Durham on 19 April was false and that he had evidence to prove he was in London that day. On Wednesday Downing Street said it considers the matter closed.

Hillier said: “If the PM just publishes the evidence he’s seen there would be no need for police time to be spent on this – the PM should put truth and public trust first and publish what he’s seen.”

Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, said: “The public have a right to know whether the prime minister’s chief adviser made a second lockdown-breaching trip to Durham, and it is surely therefore only right that this evidence is produced.”

She added: “If Dominic Cummings was in London during both the morning and afternoon of the 19 April, and not in Durham as has been alleged, I’m sure that the prime minister will welcome this opportunity to set the record straight.”

The London assembly has also called on the Met to investigate Cummings.

A detective-led inquiry in Durham found Cummings probably breached health protection rules by travelling to Barnard Castle on 12 April, but it made no finding on his decision to leave London because the three-day investigation was confined to County Durham.

Unmesh Desai, the Labour assembly member who chairs city hall’s police and crime committee, said that new allegations “have come to light about Dominic Cummings’ movements during the lockdown which raise a number of unresolved issues. As Durham police is itself the subject of criticism and complaints, it is only logical that Cummings’ own police force, the Met, now investigates this matter, and answers legitimate questions from the public.”

One of the other witnesses who originally complained to Durham police about seeing Cummings on his first trip to the north-east lockdown, has also called on the Met to investigate.

The witness, who does not wish to be named, has written to Met commissioner Cressida Dick, saying there were a number of unanswered questions about why Cummings left his home when his wife was sick with suspected coronavirus. The witness said: “Durham police seem to have left all these questions open – if they were fully investigated it would help restore public confidence in officials at a time when compliance with the regulations is still critical.”

Last month, the Met refused to investigate Cummings following a request by Nazir Afzal, the former chief prosecutor for north-west England.

On Friday night, the force said: “As a matter of course the Metropolitan police service is not investigating Covid guidance-related issues retrospectively.”

Afzal said the latest claims about Cummings’ movements underlined the need for a thorough investigation. He said: “My legal team and I have been sighted on these allegations and have no reason to disbelieve the clear, coherent and corroborative accounts from these witnesses. Mr Cummings stated that he was not in Durham at any time on the 19th, he and these witnesses cannot both be right. The failure of the police to investigate remains very disappointing given the public interest and concern.”

Joy Allen, Labour’s candidate to become Durham’s police and crime commissioner (PCC) next year, has urged the force to check number plate data on Cummings’ movements on 19 April.

She said: “Obviously PCCs can’t get involved in operational matters but, if I was Clare and Dave Edwards’ elected representative I would wholeheartedly support their request to review ANPR [automatic number plate recognition] data for that weekend to settle the matter once and for all.”

Just over a month ago Boris Johnson promised to deliver the most radical reforms to England’s planning system “since the second world war”. This week we found out what that means in practice, and it’s clear the prime minister wasn’t joking.

In a new white paper the government has set out sweeping plans to “cut red tape, overhaul the planning process and build better, greener homes faster”. But even by the standards of the modern Conservative party, this is no ordinary regulatory bonfire. In one fell swoop, the entire system that has governed land use in England for more than 70 years has been set ablaze.

Ever since the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was enacted, landowners and developers have had to apply to their local authority for planning permission to build new property or convert existing buildings from one use to another. The act was an elegant attempt by Clement Attlee’s Labour government to balance public and private interests: land was kept in private ownership but the right to develop it was nationalised.

But under the reforms published this week, this will be replaced with a zoning system under which all land will be designated as one of three categories. In so-called growth areas, permission will be granted automatically without having to submit a planning application. In “renewal” areas, which are expected to cover urban and brownfield sites, permission will be automatically granted subject to some basic checks. Only in “protected areas”, such as the green belt and areas of outstanding natural beauty, will stricter development controls apply.

At first glance this may sound innocent, perhaps even sensible. But, concealed beneath the cuddly rhetoric about “affordable, green and beautiful homes”, lies a ferocious attack on democracy. Under the current system there are two opportunities for democratic participation in the planning system: first, at the formation of a local plan which sets out the strategic priorities for development in an area; and then at the planning application stage of individual developments, which tends to be many years later. Under the proposed reforms, the second stage of consultation will be scrapped. As a result, only those with psychic powers to foresee future developments will be able to object to them at the initial plan-making stage. Democratic oversight of individual developments will soon be a thing of the past.

This is, of course, intentional. More than anything else, the reforms serve to transfer power away from local elected representatives and towards private developers, who will be able to build whatever they like, unopposed. The significance of this should not be underestimated. From now on, our built environment will be shaped around the interests of shareholder value, unchecked by democratic accountability.

Some may argue that this is a price worth paying to break the logjam in housing supply. But, according to the Local Government Association, nine out of every 10 planning applications are approved by councils anyway. Some maintain that this figure is misleading, because only those who expect planning permission to be granted bother applying. But more than a million homes that have already been granted planning permission in the last decade have not yet been built. If the planning system really is the problem, why have these homes not been built?

The government’s reforms are premised on the assumption that the planning system is to blame for a shortage of housing, but curiously the white paper presents no evidence to support this claim. According to information obtained by Shelter under a freedom of information request, the government hasn’t even bothered to assess what impact its new proposals will have on housebuilding.

Luckily however, in 2018 the government commissioned an independent review to identify the drivers of slow construction rates in England. The so-called Letwin review found that the main bottleneck on housing supply isn’t the planning system, but the “market absorption rate” – the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold on the local market without materially disturbing the existing market price.

In a system where development is left in the hands of profit-maximising firms, there is a strong incentive to build strategic land banks and drip-feed new homes on to the market at a slow rate. The reason for this is simple: releasing too many homes at once would reduce house prices in the area, which in turn would reduce profits.

By handing over even more power to private developers, the government’s reforms will make this problem even worse. Combined with the recent extension of permitted development rights (allowing change of use), the reforms could lead to a new generation of slum housing, as the Royal Institute of British Architects and others have warned. And by scrapping section 106 provisions, the future of social housebuilding has been cast into doubt.

All of this raises the question: why is Boris Johnson’s government really dismantling the planning system? As ever, it helps to follow the money.

As openDemocracy has revealed, the Conservative party has received £11m in donations from individuals and companies linked to the property sector since Johnson became prime minister. These donors are no doubt expecting a return on their investment. Robert Jenrick’s cosy relationship with Richard Desmond may may not be the last scandal to catch the limelight.

From the opening sentence to the final full stop, the government’s white paper emits a strong stench of corporate lobbying, and represents a slap in the face to evidence-based policymaking. At best the reforms represent an ideological crusade to undermine local authorities and hand over more power to private developers. At worst, they are part of a coordinated attempt to undermine English democracy. Either way, they must be resisted every step of the way.

• Laurie Macfarlane is economics editor at openDemocracy and a fellow at the UCL Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose. He is co-author of Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing

The Met Office issued a six-day Level 3 heatwave health warning that came into force at midday yesterday.

And things are definitely hotting up on the roads, with queuing traffic on all the major routes in and out of the region.

The A38 around the Tamar Bridge and westbound beyond Plymouth, plus various parts of the A30 in Cornwall were the worst affected areas at around 11.15am this morning.

LONDON — British civil servants are nervous about the impending coronavirus probe.

Sedwill told an event last month that the press reports were “damaging to the process of governance” and “demoralizing” for staff.

The same person argued there was no reason for preparations not to begin immediately, including setting the terms of reference and appointing a chairman. Indeed, Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance has begun preparations by putting out a call for an official to gather evidence.

How much do people care about the planning system? England is about to find out. Initial reaction to the government’s plan to strip councils of their powers over development has been ferocious, with planners, architects, local government, conservation charities and housing campaigners lining up with Labour to attack it. But whether ministers can be deterred from legislation that would replace the current case-by-case decision-making process with a presumption in favour of building in designated “growth” and “renewal” zones, will depend on whether the outcry runs deeper – and how long it lasts.

It is easy to see why ministers wanted to do something to boost housebuilding. Enormous rises in the value of residential property in recent decades, particularly in the southeast, have created a feel good factor among homeowners even when the wider economic position did not justify it. Meanwhile, frustration among a younger generation locked out of these unearned riches has continued to rise. It is 10 years since the former Conservative minister David Willetts published his provocative analysis of intergenerational inequality, The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – and Why They Should Give It Back. Over that period, the impact of the banking crisis and now coronavirus, combined with a bleak environmental outlook, mean that the prospects for younger people have got much worse. One survey last year found that 70% of 18- to 34-year-olds believe they will never own their own homes.

Eager to please these voters, among whom Conservatives know they have a problem, and to boost at least one part of the economy and jobs market, ministers and their advisers set about smoothing a path for developers across the tricky terrain of local authority planning meetings. But while Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, promised a “really serious debate” in communities about the new local planning documents, and insisted that the shakeup would “really help small builders”, the far more likely effect of the proposals, should they become law, is that local democracy will once again be the loser while property speculators, who form a powerful group of Tory donors, are the winners. While the promised “fast track for beauty” might sound attractive – for who, given the choice, does not prefer high-quality design? – in the context of a white paper that seeks to remove local scrutiny, and give developers free rein, it should be seen for what it is: a spoonful of sugar to help traditionalists swallow the rest.

It is only a few weeks since Mr Jenrick was revealed to have dined and swapped texts with the former Daily Express owner Richard Desmond in advance of granting him permission for a £1bn property scheme 24 hours before new community charges were imposed – a decision that was later quashed by the courts. Meanwhile at the Grenfell inquiry, evidence of the way that cost-cutting and safety checks were handled under a flagship Tory council continues to shock. Thousands of people across the country remain stuck in towers covered in unsafe cladding, while there is still no sign of a promised bill to strengthen tenants’ rights, a measure that is more urgent than ever given the approaching end of a freeze on evictions and predictions of an upsurge in pandemic-linked homelessness.

If the government and its MPs truly believe that a complete overhaul of a planning system created in 1947 is in the best interests of the country, and a priority in the current crisis, they must make the case for it. Environmental standards, it goes without saying, should be uppermost. Tweets from the prime minister, promising to “cut the red tape”, are not only insufficient but insulting given the recent and agonising history of buildings regulation failure. Whether green and pleasant or grey and urban, our land and the people who live on it deserve more than soundbites from the politicians who want to restrict their say over its future shape.

While ministers will take account of local factors such as national parks and green belts, councils that have traditionally failed to make enough land available to keep pace are being put on notice.

The document states that the new system will ensure “that the least affordable places where historic undersupply has been most chronic take a greater share of future development”.

The reforms, which also limit local politicians’ power to block individual developments, have caused unease among Tory MPs and councillors.

James Jamieson, the Local Government Association’s Conservative chairman, said: “Any loss of local control over developments would be a concern.”

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Tory MP for the Cotswolds, said: “We do need some reform, but as people who have tried this before have found, if you are not careful it does have knock-on effects.”

“Whilst I’m all in favour of building more houses, they need to be good-quality houses, we have got to be really sure that we are not building slums of tomorrow by building today at low quality,” he told the BBC.

Hugh Ellis, a director at the Town and Country Planning Association, said the greatest factor in building decent social housing for rent was investment, not planning, and warned it was “really troubling” that “this is not a democratisation of planning”.

At present, he said, critics of a building project “get two bites of the cherry, they can have an involvement in the plan, they can comment on planning applications”, he told Today on BBC Radio 4. “Half that process is going to effectively disappear.”

Shares in Britain’s biggest listed housebuilders fell yesterday amid concerns that the changes would create years of uncertainty around planning policy while the measures were consulted on and brought forward.

Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey and Barratt Developments all lost about 4 per cent of their market value.

David O’Leary, head of policy at the Home Builders Federation, said: “The big fear is this could result in a bit of paralysis for a year or two as local authorities stop working on current local plans.” However, he said that there were no major “red flags” for the big developers, which broadly welcomed the proposals. John Tutte, the chairman of Redrow, said: “I welcome anything that streamlines the planning system. It’s long overdue.”

Anthony Codling, a housing analyst, said that if the changes were implemented it could be a huge boost to big listed developers and their shareholders because they would not need to hold such big land banks. “For the largest UK housebuilders, this could free up around £1 billion of each of their balance sheets, which could fund dividends for the future.”

Smaller builders also welcomed the changes to a complex planning system that has put them at a disadvantage.

James Forrester, managing director of Stripe Homes, said: “For too long the big house builders have had a stranglehold over the sector, allowing them to drip feed developments as they see fit in order to keep house prices and their profit margins buoyant.”

The Centre for Policy Studies said that the plan for locally agreed building design codes could reduce opposition to development and make it faster and more profitable.

“Abolishing national prescriptions will clear the way for local people to set design codes on the issues that really matter to them through neighbourhood planning,” Alex Morton, the think tank’s head of policy, said.

“More broadly, these planning reforms are an intelligent first step in reform but much more detail will be needed and many vested interests will try to slow and stop reform.”

Case study

Locals locked in a four-year battle against a proposed 3,000-home development have described the news that planning laws are to be loosened as “heartbreaking” (Tom Ball writes).

Jacky Nabb, who is opposed to the building of a new village in the Oxfordshire countryside, said that it felt as though “somebody just twisted my stomach” when she heard that the government had announced plans to slash the red tape around house building.

The proposed development near Chalgrove would feature a market, a town centre, two primary schools, a secondary school, a sixth-form college and a road bypass.

After years of opposition to the plans, residents fear that the reformed planning laws would render them powerless to prevent the development from going ahead.

Ms Nabb, a Chalgrove resident, told BBC Radio 4’s Today: “It sounds really dramatic, but it broke my heart.”

Simon Reynolds, another resident, wrote on Facebook: “Fast-tracking will simply mean the local people get even less of a say than we do at present, and we are not really listened to now. South Oxfordshire district council have paid lip service to local objections but it’s all we can do.”

He urged fellow residents to oppose the planning application “while you can” before the deadline of September 1.

“Over 200 objections so far. Let’s make it three times that. Obviously the more detailed the better, but even a short objection with relevant points is good,” Mr Reynolds added.

Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, said that claims that the draft laws for England would create a generation of low-quality homes were “complete nonsense”.

Homes England, which owns an airfield that is earmarked for the development, said that it would help to “meet the unmet housing need of the area” and protect the green belt and local jobs.

Two of four people who claim to have seen Cummings on what would have been a second visit to the north-east of England have complained to the police watchdog, accusing the Durham force of not fully probing their claims.

Cummings has consistently denied returning to Durham on 19 April, days after he came back to London from a trip that was subsequently exposed in a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Daily Mirror.

The prime minister’s chief adviser has said that phone data and potentially CCTV would prove he was in London – and the Guardian has been told of one sighting of him on Hampstead Heath that afternoon.

However, neither he nor Downing Street has gone public with the evidence they say they have – and which Boris Johnson says he has seen – and pressure is mounting again for full transparency to answer lingering questions about his movements.

Cummings’ initial trip to Durham caused widespread uproar and is cited as one of the chief reasons for the public losing faith in the government’s handling of the crisis.

Clare Edwards, a nurse practitioner, and her husband, Dave, say they saw a man they believe to have been Cummings on 19 April just after 11am in Houghall woods on the edge of Durham.

On 25 May they gave statements to police about the alleged sighting, just as Cummings was giving a press conference in Downing Street denying a claim by another witness that he was seen admiring bluebells with his wife in the same woods on 19 April, at about 8.30am.

Since then, a fourth witness has alleged they saw the No 10 aide and a companion in between the woods and the home of Cummings’ parents that day, between 11.15am and 11.30am.

A further witness told the Guardian that they saw Cummings back in north London, on Hampstead Heath, later the same afternoon.

Durham police found “insufficient evidence” that Cummings was in Durham on 19 April. Following that assessment, Clare and Dave Edwards, both 59, made a subject access request under the Data Protection Act, asking the force to show them all the personal information it had about them as a result of their complaint, which they hoped might reveal how it was followed up.

Most of the police correspondence about their original complaints was redacted and labelled “official – sensitive”. All pre-dated the statements given to police, which Dave Edwards suggests means the police did nothing more with those statements.

Edwards said he believed the results, returned last week, suggested that their testimony was not taken seriously. On Wednesday the couple complained to the Independent Office for Police Conduct. They said: “Given the high-profile nature of this issue, it is inconceivable that this matter has not been followed up thoroughly. We have no personal issue with Mr Cummings or his family, but we do feel that Durham police’s handling of our complaint is below the standard we would expect from our local constabulary.”

The Edwardses asked whether officers checked automatic number recognition cameras for the movements of Cummings’ car that weekend. This information would not typically be revealed under a subject access request, and the force did not answer.

Dave Edwards, who works for a manufacturing company that supplied some of the Nightingale hospitals, remains convinced that he saw Cummings among a group of five adults and a child. “He was the dead image of Dominic Cummings. He was standing over a small child on a bike. As I got through the clearing, I said to my wife: ‘Did you see Dominic Cummings there?’

“He was identical to the TV footage: dark beanie hat, dark-rimmed glasses. If it was mistaken identity, the police could have ruled that out. If Cummings had the evidence, it would be very easy for him to say: ‘Here I am in Costa coffee in London at 10am on 19 April,’ or whatever, ‘so I couldn’t have been in Houghall woods.’

“I’m not politically motivated, I have nothing against Cummings. But we think what we saw was important given the circumstances of the lockdown, and we feel that our complaint has been airbrushed.”

Clare Edwards said: “I’m certainly sure that it was Dominic Cummings.” In her statement to officers, she said she saw a man she thought to be Cummings just after 11.01am on 19 April. She said she was able to be precise after finding a timestamped geolocated photograph she took of the woods moments before seeing the man. The couple remember the date because they had a Zoom party and quiz for their son’s birthday the day before as they were not allowed to meet due to the lockdown restrictions. Clare Edwards also called on Cummings to release evidence proving he was in London at the time.

A fourth witness, who does not want to be named, is convinced that they saw Cummings and a companion between 11.15am and 11.30am that day, between Houghall woods and Cummings’ father’s property. They made a digital note of the sighting, including location data, which was shared with friends at the time. That note has been seen by the Guardian and Daily Mirror.

The witness said: “I do follow politics, so I know what people look like.” Asked whether they were sure it was Cummings, they said: “We know his parents do live locally, so we have recognised them before in the local area. I would recognise him again. At first I could not quite believe that I had seen him. I thought: ‘Why would he be up here?’ But I posted about it on the day. I was sure about it at the time.”

A No 10 spokesman said: “Durham constabulary have made clear they are not taking any further action against Mr Cummings and that by locating himself at his father’s premises he did not breach the regulations.

“The prime minister has said he believes Mr Cummings behaved reasonably and he considers the matter closed.” No 10 did not comment on specific allegations that Cummings was in Durham on 19 April.

Cummings has defended driving to his parents’ farm from London on 27 March after fearing that he and his wife were falling ill with coronavirus, to seek potential childcare for their four-year-old son. They made a 60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle on 12 April – Cummings said to test his eyesight – and drove back to London the following day.

At his press conference in the Downing Street rose garden in May, he said it was false to claim he returned to Durham again after coming back to London on 13 April. He said: “There is a particular report that I returned there on the 19 April. Photos and data on my phone prove this to be false. And local CCTV, if it exists, would also prove that I’m telling the truth that I was in London on that day. I was not in Durham.”

Cummings said witnesses who claimed they saw him in the bluebell wood on 19 April were mistaken. He said he had walked in woodland during his self-isolation period, but only on his father’s property.

At the end of May, the prime minister was challenged by the Commons liaison committee about whether he had seen the evidence. After dodging the question three times, he said he had, but refused MPs’ requests to publish the evidence or pass it to the cabinet secretary for independent scrutiny.

The Guardian asked Downing Street to provide the data to rule out a case of mistaken identity on 19 April, but it declined.

A Durham police spokesman said: “As outlined in our statement of 28 May, Durham constabulary carried out an investigation into this matter led by a senior detective and found insufficient evidence to support the allegation.”

• Additional reporting by Duncan Campbell

29^th May: An email arrives. “Dear Sir, I am delighted to offer you a job as one of the UK’s ‘world-beating’ test and tracers. It will be tough, skilled work, involving dozens of phone calls each day, and your training will begin tomorrow. Thank you again for your dedication. Together we can beat the coronavirus and bring the country back to normal by Christmas. Yours, Boris Johnson and Baroness Dido Harding.”

7^th June: Another email arrives. “Congratulations on completing your training.” I reply that I have yet to receive any training. Hear nothing back.

9^th June: I email the head of training at Serco to remind her of my existence and to say that I am still awaiting instructions. This time she replies promptly to say that the training was targeted to help workers get used to long periods of doing nothing and that I need to be focused a great deal more on being patient. The less we do, the more effective we are being.

23^rd June: I have yet to make a single test-and-trace call, despite having sat at home with my phone at the ready and the TV switched off for the past 14 days. I ring my local Serco HQ to check that they actually have the right number for me. They do so, and confirm that I am in the weekly draw for the most productive member of staff over the course of the last week.

1^st July: Sod’s law. Have just invited some friends over for a barbecue, when I get an alert from the test-and-trace centre to call someone. Go indoors to prepare to give the bad news they will have to self-isolate for 14 days only to find it is a non-existent number.

4^th July: I’m now on a roll. I get a second alert and call the number, which goes straight to voicemail. I don’t let this go as I don’t want to be responsible for a super-spreader slipping through the net. Eventually a man picks up and starts yelling at me. I am the 12^th person to have contacted him over the past few days and would I please stop interrupting his quarantine?

10^th July: The call centre emails to ask me what my favourite flower is. I give this a few minutes’ thought and reply. “On balance, I think I like bluebells the best. Why do you want to know?” An hour or so later I get an out-of-office reply saying “To be honest, we don’t give a shit one way or another what your favourite flower is. It was just a way of finding out how many of you were still monitoring your phones.”

18^th July: I have seldom felt so desperate. I submit my own number to the test-and-trace database just so that someone will ring me to tell me to self-isolate. Even then no one calls. I ring the Serco human resources department. After half an hour the line goes to voicemail. “If you are a test and tracer who feels their life might be entirely futile, please try calling the self-help group Test and Trace Anonymous.”

19^th July: “My name’s Simon and I’m a test and tracer,” I say. “Join the club,” says a woman. “Try not to worry too much. There are thousands of us who feel the same. Some people have been doing this for months without talking to anyone. Why don’t you sign up for one of our daily quizzes?” Finally I feel like I am getting somewhere.

21^st July: Totally psyched for the quiz. “Question 1: Name the woman on the Jockey Club board who was responsible for giving this year’s Cheltenham festival the go-ahead, thereby risking the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.” Easy. Dido Harding. “Question 2: Name the former chief executive of TalkTalk whose utter ignorance of the company was famously described as a lesson to all.” That would be Dido again. I’m beginning to think there may be a theme here.

24^th July: Am given a number to ring by one of the other test and tracers. Big mistake. I get through to a Liam Fox who thinks I am from the World Trade Organization. “I’m sorry about all my hacked emails on the US-UK trade talks,” he says. “But am I still in line to be director of the WTO?” I suggest that’s unlikely. But on the upside I tell him he doesn’t have to self-isolate for 14 days. He starts blubbing and I put the phone down gently.

26^th July: I finally get to make a call that isn’t a fake number, doesn’t go to voicemail and hasn’t been rung countless times before. As a result, I am given a €50 voucher to spend anywhere in Spain over the course of the next month.

27^th July: All non-essential travel to Spain is stopped and a 14-day quarantine imposed on travellers returning from the country. Try to flog my voucher to friends stuck in Spain for €20. Get told to bugger off.

1^st August: Receive a message from Boris Johnson saying all those working from home should now be working in the office. Worried, I ring the No 10 switchboard to let them know I don’t have an office. A bored receptionist says not to worry as Boris is working from his country house for the rest of the summer.