Under the proposals, unveiled on Thursday, planning applications based on pre-approved “design codes” would get an automatic green light – eliminating a whole stage of local oversight within designated zones.

Land across England would be divided into three categories – for growth, renewal or protection – under what Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, described as “once in a generation” reforms to sweep away an outdated planning system and boost building.

New homes, hospitals, schools, shops and offices would be allowed automatically in “growth” areas. In “renewal” zones, largely urban and brownfield sites, proposals would be given “permission in principle” subject to basic checks. Green belt and areas of outstanding natural beauty would be protected.

While the proposed changes are likely to appeal to developers, they prompted stinging criticism from housing charities, planning officers and architects who warned of a new generation of fast and substandard housing.

The Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) condemned them as disruptive and rushed, saying 90% of planning applications are currently approved but there are up to 1m unbuilt permissions. Labour called it “a developers’ charter” that will “set fire to important safeguards”.

The long-awaited government white paper touts a new streamlined process designed to reduce red tape and harness technology to deliver homes more rapidly, ministers said. Government sources insisted there would be no dilution in building standards.

Changes out for consultation under the white paper also include:

• Requiring local housing plans to be developed and agreed in 30 months, down from the current seven years.
• Extending the current exemption of small sites from having to make “section 106” payments – the means by which developers are forced to provide affordable housing.
• Ensuring that all new homes are carbon-neutral by 2050.

At the weekend, Jenrick said the new regime drew inspiration from “design codes and pattern books” used in the construction of Bath, Belgravia and Bournville.

But the prospect of a modern-day application and use of such codes to give developers “permission in principle” in zones categorised as being for growth was greeted with alarm in some quarters.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) described the proposals as “shameful” and said they would do “almost nothing to guarantee the delivery of affordable, well-designed and sustainable homes”. “While they might help to ‘get Britain building’ – paired with the extension of permitted development rights last week – there’s every chance they could also lead to the development of the next generation of slum housing,” said RIBA president Alan Jones.

Proposals to extend the current exemption of small sites from having to make section 106 payments were slated as a way of helping smaller developers bounce back from the economic impact of the pandemic.

But Shelter said social housing “could face extinction” if the requirement for developers to build their fair share was removed. “Section 106 agreements between developers and councils are tragically one of the only ways we get social homes built these days, due to a lack of direct government investment,” said its chief executive, Polly Neate.

“So, it makes no sense to remove this route to genuinely affordable homes without a guaranteed alternative.”

The proposals contain scant detail on any alternative way to boost the number of affordable homes, promising only that they will not decrease.

The white paper proposes a consultation on developers making in-kind payments of affordable homes toward the levy or allowing local authorities to buy a proportion of affordable housing at a discounted rate.

Hugh Ellis, director of policy at TCPA, criticised the reforms overall, saying: “This kind of disruptive reform doesn’t suit anybody, neither landowners nor developers. They’re turning the system on its head at a time when it’s working very well for the volume house builders – 90% of planning applications are approved and there are about a million unbuilt permissions.”

He added: “It’s about local democracy. When local people are walking down the street and come across a new development they didn’t know about, the answer will now be: ‘You should have been involved in the consultation eight years ago when the code was agreed.’

“It’s diluting the democratic process. At the moment, people get two chances to be involved: once when the plan is made, and once when a planning application is submitted. Now they’ll only have a chance when the code is being prepared.”

Zack Simons, a planning barrister at Landmark chambers, said there was a lot to welcome in a move towards digitising the planning system but added that “literally nothing” trailed in Jenrick’s public statements could not already be achieved under the current planning system.

“Promises of “radical reform” can grab headlines. But remember that of more than 400,000 planning applications which are determined every year, over 80% are granted permission and under 0.5% are appealed to the Planning Inspectorate.”

A government source said it was misleading to suggest planning rules were not an obstacle to building. “The [90%] approval statistic masks the numbers of people who are put off applying altogether because of how bureaucratic and difficult this is,” the source said.

However, little has been announced on what measures, if any, will be taken against developers who do not use the permission they have been granted.

The white paper takes aim at the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which has acted as the basis for planning since it was passed by the Labour government of Clement Attlee.

A “complex” planning system has acted as a barrier to building the homes people need, said Jenrick. “We will cut red tape, but not standards, placing a higher regard on quality, design and the environment than ever before,” he said. “Planning decisions will be simple and transparent, with local democracy at the heart of the process. As we face the economic effects of the pandemic, now is the time for decisive action and a clear plan for jobs and growth.”

The Conservatives will hope the overhaul will be favoured not only by investors and developers, but also by the younger voters currently outside its reach.

The Tory manifesto commits the government to 300,000 new homes built every year and, before coronavirus hit, senior Tories saw housing as the key mission of the government as a way of targeting a primary concern of many under-40s and city-dwelling voters shut out of the housing market – those most likely to vote Labour.

“We are seeing a huge generation divide on housing,” one Tory source said. “The under-40s may have half as much chance of owning a home. That is being directly addressed by the first homes programme but the broader point is this planning system has held back homes being built on land that is ready to be built on.

“And we know the main concerns which local people may have are about good design, environmentally friendly, buildings that fit into the architectural landscape, ones people are proud to own. We are not cutting any building standards.”

Jack Airey was hired as a special adviser against the backdrop of Dominic Cummings’ shake-up of the Downing Street apparatus. Yet a report co-authored by him and published in January by the thinktank Policy Exchange is regarded as a precursor of the overhaul announced on Thursday.

In Rethinking the Planning System for the 21st Century, Airey sketched out plans for a bonfire of red tape and a future in which “development rules should be clear and non-negotiable”.

Throwing out the notion that specific uses should be attached to individual private land plots, he wrote, “Market conditions should instead determine how urban space is used in the development zone.”

Before that report, he had also been regarded as one of the drivers of a “building beautiful” agenda, co-authoring in 2018 a Policy Exchange paper with the late Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton.

Thursday’s white paper owes much to the recommendations of a Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission subsequently chaired by Scruton, which called for measures to “end ugliness” and a planning “fast track for beauty”.

Though coming from a thinktank known for its rightwing tilt, and as a platform for strongly pro-Brexit positions, Airey himself does not fit with the caricature some on the left might be tempted to paint. He has, for example, pushed back at the notion that immigration has been at the centre of the housing crisis and called for the building of new homes rather than “pulling up the drawbridge”.

Nevertheless, he has spoken of his surprise at feeling what he described as the “full throttle of some parts of the architectural community”, following his work with Scruton.

“I knew it existed but I was taken aback by some of the things some people have said,” he recalled in one interview with an architect’s podcast, in which he spoke of his proposals being labelled “fascistic”.

Judging by the initial reaction to the government’s white paper, his latest ideas might yet become the focus of even greater heat.

The “streaming algorithm”, which campaigners have described as racist, has been used since 2015 to process visa applications to the UK. It will be abandoned from Friday, according to a letter from Home Office solicitors seen by the Guardian.

The decision to scrap it comes ahead of a judicial review from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), which was to challenge the Home Office’s artificial intelligence system that filters UK visa applications.

Campaigners claim the Home Office decision to drop the algorithm ahead of the court case represents the UK’s first successful challenge to an AI decision-making system.

Chai Patel, JCWI’s legal policy director, said: “The Home Office’s own independent review of the Windrush scandal found it was oblivious to the racist assumptions and systems it operates.

“This streaming tool took decades of institutionally racist practices, such as targeting particular nationalities for immigration raids, and turned them into software. The immigration system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up to monitor such bias and to root it out.”

In their submission to the high court, JWCI and the technology justice campaign group Foxglove said the algorithm created three channels for applicants, including a so-called “fast lane” that would lead to “speedy boarding for white people” from the most favoured countries in the system.

In the Home Office letter, its solicitors confirm that the home secretary, Priti Patel, “has decided that she will discontinue the use of the streaming tool to assess visa applications, pending a substitute review of its operation”.

Referring to the redesign of a new streaming visa system, the letter continues: “In the course of that redesign, our client intends carefully to consider and assess the points you have raised in your claim including, issues around unconscious bias and the use of nationality generally in the streaming tool.”

However, the Home Office solicitors add: “For clarity, the fact of the redesign does not mean that the secretary of state for the home department accepts the allegations in your claim form.”

Cori Crider, the founder and director of Foxglove, said: “What we need is democracy, not government by secret algorithm. Before any further systems get rolled out, let’s ask the public whether automation is appropriate at all, and make the systems transparent so biases can be spotted and dug out at the roots.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We have been reviewing how the visa application streaming tool operates and will be redesigning our processes to make them even more streamlined and secure.

“We do not accept the allegations Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants made in their judicial review claim and whilst litigation is still ongoing it would not be appropriate for the department to comment any further.”

The most extraordinary upheaval in modern British government is to be introduced this week by Boris Johnson. He is, in effect, to end planning permission. Local councils and those they represent are to be stripped of control over new buildings, to be replaced by central government “zoning” commissions. At the weekend, the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, promised a “change in a generation”. It is more than that. It ends half a century of regulation of England’s landscape and urban development.

The proposed reform will release building rights anywhere outside existing national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. Though it promises “protection” to other countryside, there is no conceivable way a new commission can review and “register” every acre for protection. This will unleash the sprawl seen across many countries in the rest of Europe, with owners able to build over their land at will – erecting houses, sheds, advertisements, car parks. It will unleash frantic land speculation in the south-east, and further accelerate the “race to the south”. We can forget Johnson’s “levelling up” pledge.

Details of the reform are to be slipped out under cover of the pandemic and with parliament not sitting. Seventeen environmental organisations have already jointly dubbed it a “race to the bottom”. A planning-profession spokesman on the BBC’s Farming Today on Tuesday morning sounded concussed. Under the now-doomed 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, Britain has been remarkably successful – compared with most countries – in guarding its rural land from haphazard development. This is clearly intended to end.

It is ludicrous to dismiss local participation in planning, as Johnson does, as “nimbyism”. The outskirts of any built-up southern area shows the impotence of that tendency. Under new rules the “zoning” commissioners will merely have to designate land as developable, whereupon owners can legally do what they like. There are various ideas to tax their profits to aid infrastructure and subsidise homes “for locals”, but such schemes have been tried, off and on, for half a century. The Attlee government tried them. They never work as intended. This is a market that takes no prisoners. There is no “free market” in the loveliness of town and country.

Jenrick’s declared ambition in all this is to end an “outdated and cumbersome system” whereby “half as many 16-34 year olds own their own houses as those aged 35-64”. But there have always been more older than younger homeowners. Besides, anyone seriously concerned with housing supply just now should worry about renting and its regulation, not buying. How much influence have lobbyists for the private housebuilding industry – ardent greenfield developers and ancestral foes of planners – had over the new reforms?

As one of the largest collective group of Tory donors, this lobby played a key role in David Cameron’s much less radical planning shake-up in 2012. That ordered local planning committees to adopt a “presumption in favour of sustainable development”. It unleashed “executive estates” across southern England, mostly on greenfield sites unrelated to existing towns or villages. Devoid of community infrastructure, they relied on private vehicles for every need and were in no sense “sustainable”.

The now-incentivised development of the south-east is distorted national planning. Latest figures show that England north of the Wash is poorer per head than former East Germany and even the most depressed American states. Meanwhile, building-industry pressure continues to ensure that no VAT is levied on new buildings, but remains at 20% on all building renewal. It is a simple tax on sustainability. Extinction Rebellion should be up in arms.

While much planning has become slow-moving, this is largely because a decade of austerity has slashed staffing levels by 30%. Even so, nine out of 10 planning applications are approved. The point of planning is not always to say yes. In the event, Cameron’s reforms have proved so generous that plans for a million homes have been granted and “banked”, languishing unbuilt. To blame planning for this is utterly bogus.

There is a case for looking afresh at how much of rural England should be guarded from bad development, and how to promote urban renewal. More housing density in towns, such as extra storeys, may make sense in some places. So does easing change of use, especially for hospitality and leisure businesses. The green belt would not need to be sacrosanct were other parts of the countryside offered equal protection, but there is no likelihood of that. None of this requires decontrol.

The issue is who should have power over scarce land. Whitehall already has inordinate scope to intervene in local decisions on appeal. Jenrick recently overruled local planners in Docklands to help a billionaire developer at the flick of his pen, a decision that was later quashed. The antagonism of Johnson and his colleagues towards anything local, seen disastrously under coronavirus, is clearly visceral. But his reform is of a new order. It cancels the democratic right of people to exercise some control over their immediate surroundings, over the character and appearance of their neighbourhood. This is not mere nimbyism – any more than Johnson’s friends are mere profiteers. But it is a civil right that deserves better than to be smothered by commissars.

In a lecture this summer, Johnson’s colleague Michael Gove championed the idea of “allowing communities to take back more control of policies that matter to them”. If he meant what he said, he should prepare to resign.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist.

The security breaches last year, which are subject to an ongoing police investigation, pose serious questions for the Conservative MP who is currently the UK’s nominee to become director general of the World Trade Organization.

Whitehall sources indicated the documents were hacked from a personal account rather than a parliamentary or ministerial one, prompting Labour to ask why Fox was using unsecured personal emails for government business.

A spokesman for the former minister declined to comment and later stressed the Cabinet Office had not publicly confirmed which account was hacked. Downing Street and the Cabinet Office said it was inappropriate to comment further given that criminal inquiries were continuing.

The stolen documents – a 451-page dossier of emails – ultimately ended up in the hands of Jeremy Corbyn during last winter’s election campaign after Russian actors tried to disseminate the material online.

They had been posted on the social media platform Reddit and brought to the attention of the then Labour leader’s team. Corbyn said the documents revealed the NHS “was on the table” in trade talks with the US.

Details of Russia’s targeting of Fox’s emails were first revealed on Monday by Reuters, which said his account was accessed several times between 12 July and 21 October last year. It was unclear if the documents were obtained when the staunch leave supporter was still trade secretary; he was dropped by Boris Johnson on 24 July.

The attack is understood to have deployed a “spear-phishing” technique frequently used by Russian actors, in which superficially plausible emails are sent inviting the recipient to click on an attached file. The file contains malicious code designed to give access to or take control of the target’s computer.

Chris Bryant, a Labour MP and former Foreign Office minister, said he was not surprised that the Kremlin might want to hack the trade secretary’s email, given Russia’s long history of targeting western politicians.

“What shocks me is using insecure personal email accounts for sensitive, classified government business. This a very serious breach of national security and should be a criminal offence,” Bryant added.

Using personal emails for UK government business is not illegal but ministers are reminded that government information “must be handled in accordance with the requirements of the law, including the Official Secrets Act”, in guidance published by the government in 2013.

That came two years after Michael Gove, then education secretary, and his aide Dominic Cummings were discovered to have used personal emails for government business. The information commissioner ruled subsequently that such emails were nevertheless covered by freedom of information laws.

It had previously been thought that the US-UK trade documents were hacked via a special adviser’s personal email. Last December, Cummings – by now the prime minister’s chief adviser – warned all political aides to be vigilant as it had emerged “foreign powers” were targeting British politicians.

Accurately attributing the origin of hacker attacks is notoriously difficult and often requires extensive investigation. But there are also political reasons to be cautious about publicly blaming the Kremlin for the attack.

Any accusation that an MP and former minister was targeted by Russia would prompt an escalation in tensions between London and Moscow, already heightened after British ministers made a string of accusations about Russian hacking.

Last month Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, accused Russian actors of trying to disseminate the trade documents online but did not divulge how they were thought to have been obtained.

All the government would say was that the classified material appeared to have been stolen. Raab said the dossier had been illicitly acquired before the 2019 general election and that there was an ongoing criminal investigation.

He also accused Russian hackers from the group known as Cozy Bear of targeting UK, US and Canadian research organisations involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine.

Raab said it was “completely unacceptable” for Russian intelligence services to target research on the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been previously been alleged that Cozy Bear is controlled by the Russian FSB spy agency or its SVR foreign intelligence agency, although the Kremlin denied it was behind the alleged attacks.

Days later, a long-delayed MPs’ report concluded the British government and intelligence agencies failed to conduct any proper assessment of Kremlin attempts to interfere with the 2016 Brexit referendum, with ministers in effect turning a blind eye to allegations of Russian disruption.

In July the UK nominated Fox for the post of director general of the WTO, which falls vacant at the end of this month. Fox is one of eight candidates for the position, which is chosen by the 164 member countries in a process expected to last into the autumn.

Fox, 58, has been an MP since 1992 and twice stood for the Conservative party leadership. He was made trade secretary under Theresa May in 2016. The MP for North Somerset had been forced to resign as defence secretary in 2011 after it emerged that a lobbyist friend, Adam Werritty, was acting as an adviser to him despite not being employed by the government.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “There is an ongoing criminal investigation into how the documents were acquired, and it would be inappropriate to comment further at this point. But as you would expect, the government has very robust systems in place to protect the IT systems of officials and staff.”

In 2017 up to 90 email accounts belonging to peers and MPs – 1% of parliament’s 9,000 email addresses – were hacked in an orchestrated cyber-attack. Later that year it was reported that passwords belonging to 1,000 British MPs and 1,000 Foreign Office staff had been traded by Russian hackers, with the majority of passwords said to have been compromised in a 2012 hacking raid on the business social network LinkedIn, in which millions of users’ details were stolen.

The future of the high street, we are told, is to build more homes on it. You can see the argument. Even before coronavirus, many big retailers were struggling to make rent as people increasingly turned to online shopping. Shop vacancies were rising and commercial landlords, many of them overloaded with debt and watching their share prices tumble, were wondering what to do next. The pandemic has merely hastened the demise of a failing model.

Meanwhile, there is the housing crisis. Put two and two together and you get the government’s move to relax planning regulations so that shops can easily be turned into homes. John Lewis is the first mover, announcing last week that it is planning to turn some of its excess shop space into “affordable housing”. It won’t be the last. At first glance, this all seems fine. Clearly we need fewer shops and more homes. So what’s the problem?

It starts with what we think the high street actually is. Many use the term as shorthand for retail, given that sector’s dominance over our town centres in the past century or so. But a high street is not a sector, it’s a place – and not just any old place. Saturated in history, it is the guardian of a town or city’s identity. It gives us a space to connect with each other, and to nourish our idea of home. In short, a high street is deeply meaningful. If it becomes just another place to live, then our towns and cities will be drained of that meaning.

There is clearly a place for more homes on the high street, if that is what people want and if the type of housing meets their actual needs. No doubt some commercial landlords (and perhaps John Lewis will be one of them) will be highly sensitive to these requirements and build just the right type of housing. Other developers, such as Grosvenor and U+I, are making serious efforts to build relationships with the communities where they work. It is wrong to dismiss any owner or developer of land as problematic by default.

The problem is that a massive relaxation of planning regulations puts the fate of our towns and cities entirely in the hands of these landlords. For every sensitive developer engaging with communities in good faith, there will be plenty who simply want to maximise profit. That could mean many of our high streets become meaningless places crammed with substandard homes. Certainly all the evidence shows that giving landlords permitted development rights leads directly to poor-quality housing.

The planning system is many things, but above all it is a democratic promise. It is a guarantee that places will not simply develop according to the interests of whoever owns the land, but will also be shaped by public interest. To build, you need public consent.

The government hasn’t just made it easier to turn shops into homes: it has effectively greenlit any demolition of vacant property as long as homes are built in its place. It has also allowed homeowners to build two extra storeys without seeking permission. In other words, it has kneecapped the planning system, and broken the democratic promise it offers. It did all this the day before parliament broke up for the summer, introducing secondary legislation which is difficult to overturn. And these are just the first steps: later in the year it will be announcing a full reform of the planning system with the intention of making it easier to build. Few are hopeful that this will protect the public’s ability to influence what gets built.

As EP Thompson wrote: “Liberty of conscience was the one great value which the common people had preserved from the Commonwealth. The countryside was ruled by the gentry, the towns by corrupt corporations, the nation by the corruptest corporation of all: but the chapel, the tavern and the home were their own.”

The chapel, the tavern and the home: these represent three potential uses of the future high street. As retail recedes, there could be space for more entertainment and experience in the form of pubs, cafes and community centres – whether places of religious or civic congregation – and yes, more homes. These are things which people believe, in some instinctive sense, they jointly own. Now we are in danger of losing what control we still have in fostering these elements of our common life.

A great deal of democratic energy is channelled by the planning system. If that system is undermined, the energy will not disappear. It will simply be redirected, either through the ballot box or through local flare-ups that blow back on the government. This is a political operation convinced of its ability to hear the voice of the people. Perhaps it needs to listen a little more closely.

• Will Brett is a campaigns, communications and public affairs consultant

The housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, said the investment would be “laying the foundations for a green economic recovery”.

Jenrick and the prime minister have promised major changes to planning laws in England, to be formally announced in the coming days, under which new homes and hospitals could be granted automatic planning permission to speed up building.

Under the plans, local councils will be asked to designate land either as “growth”, “renewal” or “protection”. New developments will be granted automatic permission on “growth” land and “renewal” areas will see developments given “permission in principle” subject to some checks. Only areas given the “protection” status, including the greenbelt, will not have automatic building rights.

The forthcoming reforms have led to warnings from housing charities about the potential risk of low-quality homes.

The government has also confirmed a £360m investment in Mayoral Combined Authority areas such as Greater Manchester and the West Midlands to build 26,000 more homes while protecting greenfield sites, with a further £8m earmarked to speed up the delivery of these new homes on brownfield sites.

The business and energy department also detailed its plans to fund up to two-thirds of the costs of green home improvements for more than 600,000 homes.

Tradespeople must register for TrustMark accreditation for improvements from wall insulation, floors and roofs to the installation of low-carbon heating. Households on low income can receive vouchers covering 100% of the cost of the improvements, up to a maximum of £10,000.

The investment is part of the £5bn New Deal spending announced in June, part of the £600bn-plus Sunak allocated in his March budget for capital projects over the next five years.

In a letter to England’s chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser, nearly 70 clinical virologists say they have been sidelined by the government and excluded from discussions on how to respond to the pandemic.

New 90-minute tests announced with fanfare by ministers on Monday were the latest example of how virologists were being bypassed, they say. They have been using rapid tests such as these already – but say they have no knowledge of or information on the DnaNudge or LamPORE tests that the government is contracting to buy.

The UK Clinical Virology Network wrote to Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, on 10 July but say they have had no response. The experts in testing for viruses such as Covid-19 mostly work in 40 NHS and Public Health England (PHE) laboratories across the country.

They were writing, they said in their letter, “to express our concern over lack of engagement by policymakers with clinical virology expertise in the UK in the management of the Covid-19 (Sars-CoV-2 pandemic)”.

The letter adds: “Our skills have been underused and underrepresented (albeit to differing extents within the devolved nations of the UK), resulting in lost opportunities to establish a coordinated robust and durable testing framework for Sars-CoV-2.”

Deenan Pillay, a professor of virology at University College London, is one of the signatories. “There’s always new tests being developed. And it’s almost as if they’re being pushed as a sort of magic bullet … it’s almost like getting stuff out to actually reassure the public rather than the more boring but really hard work of doing proper contact tracing,” he told the Guardian.

He and others think the government is convinced that only the private sector can rise to the pandemic challenges. But, he said, a series of mistakes and problems had arisen from failing to consult with clinical virologists.

In March the government rushed into buying antibody tests that were then found not to work well enough.

In the same month, it set up drive-through testing centres and so-called Lighthouse labs – privately and publicly operated – to increase the number of swabs taken and processed, but did not have the systems to feed the data into the NHS and public health authorities around the country, where it is needed.

“If you’re going to build a Lighthouse lab or a new lab somewhere, to have it under control of an NHS laboratory would be the obvious thing,” said Pillay. “It was the first thing I said when Deloitte phoned me and asked me for advice on setting up Lighthouse labs.

“I said, well, the most important thing is not just the test – it is the data. How are you going to get it [to] assimilate into NHS data systems? And again, that was overlooked. I think we now realise that was a major error.”

The only clinical virologist on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) is from the main PHE reference laboratory, he said.

Prof Will Irving at the University of Nottingham, another signatory, pointed to centralised control of the response when Lighthouse labs were set up. “We never quite reached capacity. We could have done more testing,” he said of the Nottingham laboratory.

“When I first saw the email that … the army were going to come up to the university the next day and collect whatever machines we could give them to go down to the Milton Keynes Lighthouse [lab], my first reaction was – that’s a really good idea. You put all these capabilities in a very large warehouse, and you work it 24 hours a day. You can do a huge amount of testing.

“But just like whoever first thought of that, I hadn’t thought it through. And in fact, the actual testing in the laboratory – of taking the sample and determining whether or not it’s got virus in it – is far and away the easiest part of the whole process,” he said.

Diagnostic laboratories such as his had rigorous processes for getting the results where they should be, so patients could be treated, contacts traced and local public health officials notified of what was happening in their area.

Instead, it emerged that some Lighthouse labs sent home volunteers because there were too few samples to process, while some patients got wrong or delayed results. “We heard stories about thousands of samples being sent to the United States for testing which is just plain ridiculous,” he said. “And it just seems there is a rush to do everything privately.”

The virologists still hope they can help, advising that private testing centres and labs should be at least partnered with an NHS or PHE diagnostic laboratory. “It is not too late to effect change. The Covid-19 pandemic response will need to evolve through the coming winter and beyond … We ask that you reach out to the clinical and academic virologists in all countries of the UK,” the letter says.

A government spokesperson said: “We have made significant strides in our approach to tackling coronavirus and have been guided by the latest scientific advice throughout … At every stage, the government’s response has been informed by the advice of experts from SAGE and its sub-committees. Our approach is kept under constant review as new international and domestic evidence emerges.”

A new study published in Lancet Public Health has found that front-line healthcare workers with adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) have a three-fold increased risk of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, compared to the general population.

Those with inadequate PPE had a further increase in risk. The study also found that healthcare workers from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds were more likely to test positive.

Using the COVID Symptom Study App, researchers from King’s College, London and Harvard looked at data from 2,035,395 individuals and 99,795 front-line health-care workers in the UK and US. The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 was 2747 cases per 100,000 front-line health-care workers compared with 242 cases per 100,000 people in the general community. A little over 20 percent of front-line health-care workers reported at least one symptom associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with 14·4 percent of the general population; fatigue, loss of smell or taste, and hoarse voice were especially frequent.

BAME health-care workers were at an especially high risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, with at least a fivefold increased risk of infection compared with the non-Hispanic white general community.

Professor Sebastien Ourselin, senior author from King’s College London said: “The findings of our study have tremendous impact for healthcare workers and hospitals. The data is clear in revealing that there is still an elevated risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection despite availability of PPE.

“In particular we note that that the BAME community experience elevated risk of infection and in some cases lack access to adequate PPE, or frequently reuse equipment.”

Researchers say their study not only shows the importance of adequate availability and use of PPE, but also the crucial need for additional strategies to protect healthcare workers, such as ensuring correct application and removal of PPE and avoiding reuse which was associated with increased risk.

Differences were also noted in PPE adequacy according to race and ethnicity, with non- Hispanic white health-care workers more frequently reporting reuse of or inadequate access to PPE, even after adjusting for exposure to patients with COVID-19.

Joint first author Dr Mark Graham from King’s College London said: “The work is important in the context of the widely reported higher death rates amongst healthcare workers from BAME backgrounds. Hopefully a better understanding of the factors contributing to these disparities will inform efforts to better protect workers.”

Dr Claire Steves, lead clinical researcher from King’s College London said: “I’m very pleased we have now introduced masks and social distancing where possible for all interactions in hospitals – to protect ourselves and the population we serve.  We need to ensure this is reinforced and sustained throughout the health service – including in health care settings outside hospitals, for example in care homes.

“Additional protective strategies are equally as important, such as implementing social distancing among healthcare staff. Stricter protocols for socialising among healthcare staff also need to be considered.”

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The department for housing said new builds that have been delayed due to the virus will have an extra 60 days to complete, with the building deadline extended from December 2020 to February 28 2021.