The scale of the government’s reliance on management consultants has been laid bare as analysis shows that spending with eight top firms has risen by 45% to more than £450m in three years.

Rajeev Syal www.theguardian.com 

Deloitte, the professional services firm, was the biggest winner, earning fees of £147m from public funds in 2019-20, compared with £40m two years earlier, amid a bonanza related in large part to Brexit.

The Home Office had the biggest increase in consultancy spending over three years, jumping 788% to £57m as the department dealt with security, immigration and border preparations for leaving the EU.

The results of the analysis of more than 11,000 government invoices came on Tuesday as Boris Johnson promoted the private sector, saying “free enterprise” must lead the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

In his speech to Conservative party conference, the prime minister sounded a warning about the extent of state intervention on schemes such as furlough and said: “There comes a moment when the state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it. We must not draw the wrong economic conclusion from this crisis.”

However, last week the minister in charge of curbing Whitehall spending, Theodore Agnew, wrote a letter to senior civil servants saying the civil service had become “infantilised” by an “unacceptable” reliance on expensive management consultants.

While 1% of civil servants are paid more than £80,000 a year, day rates for management consultants working in the public sector range from about £1,000 for junior consultants to about £3,500 for partners.

Research carried out by the data provider Tussell has identified how much each of the government’s ministries has spent with eight consultancies between 2017-18 and 2019-20.

The highest-spending department on consultancies in the last financial year was the Department for Transport, which has paid out £88m, a three-year increase of 156%.

The Cabinet Office, the department from which Lord Agnew and his close political ally Michael Gove oversee civil service expenditure, has nearly trebled its spending on outside consultancies over three years to reach £37m, the analysis showed.

The Department for International Development spent £67m on management consultancies in 2019-20 while the Ministry of Defence, which has been criticised in the past for its reliance on contractors, cut expenditure on consultancies from £93m in 2017-18 to £58m this year.

Deloitte appears to be the preferred consultants for the Home Office, having received £73m out of £110m spent on external advisers since 2017-18. Although many of the Home Office contracts are related to Brexit, the biggest Deloitte contract with the department is £60m, spent on the Emergency Services Network.

PricewaterhouseCoopers was the second biggest-earning consultancy from the public purse last year, receiving £106m, according to the analysis. It has earned a total of £294m over three years. The data shows that PwC was paid £32m by the Cabinet Office over three years out of a total departmental spend on the eight consultancies of £121m.

Over that period, PwC has recruited key figures who know the Cabinet Office well, including Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s former chief of staff, and Philip Rycroft, the former permanent secretary who held senior positions across Whitehall.

The Ministry of Defence appears to have a close relationship with KPMG, having paid the firm £76m out of a total consultancy spend of £203m between April 2017 and March 2020.

Several senior figures have left the MoD to become paid advisers to KPMG, including Air Marshal Sir Simon Bollom who left his job as chief of materiel (air) in defence equipment and support in 2016 and soon after advised the management consultancy on RAF Brize Norton. He has now returned to the MoD as the chief executive of defence equipment and support.

Over the last year, EY earned fees across Whitehall worth £75m, while KPMG was paid £57m from government departments, according to the analysis.

The other four major consultancies – PA Consulting, McKinsey, BCG and Bain & Co – signed deals worth a total of £76m last year, the analysis showed.

Management consultants are typically brought in where it is thought specialist advice or expertise is needed, but there have been longstanding concerns over the extent of their use in the public sector.

Many senior civil servants or ministers work for consultancy firms at some stage in their career, so there are often strong personal links or relationships between staff on both sides.

Cabinet Office data reported by the National Audit Office last year showed a significant drop in spending on consultants after the introduction of new controls in 2010, from almost £2bn in 2009-10 to £400m-£700m in each of the following six years.

A spokesperson for Deloitte said: “We are confident that our work adds significant value to the public sector organisations we work with.

“Deloitte works closely with the Home Office, its agencies and police forces, assisting on their largest and most complex programmes and building and delivering new technologies.”

A PwC spokesperson said the firm follows all relevant rules and regulations when employing former politicians and civil servants. “We are brought in to provide specialist skills at speed where the breadth and depth of our experience makes a positive difference. We work alongside public sector clients to help tackle complex problems and situations where our expertise is needed,” he said.

A government spokesperson said they did not recognise some of the figures in the analysis. “We continue to take considerable steps to reduce unnecessary spending and protect taxpayers’ money,” they said.

“Ministers are concerned that the government is too reliant on consultants and have written to departments to make clear that services should only be procured when external expertise is essential and represents value for money. Where possible, we want to harness the wide range of skills within the civil service.”

KPMG declined to comment. EY has been approached for comment.

The University area of Exeter has leapt into the top ten of areas in England with positive cases of Covid-19 with a rise from 127 to 223 cases in today’s updated figures showing the country’s largest coronavirus clusters.

Colleen Smith www.devonlive.com

The numbers show how many confirmed cases have been found in each MSOA (Middle Super Output Areas) between Monday September 28 and Friday October 2.

Within a matter of days the number of clusters (areas with more than three positive cases) has exploded across Devon.

There are now nine clusters in Exeter, eight in Plymouth, 10 in Torbay and six in Teignbridge – others are also in North Devon, West Devon and mid Devon.

Exeter’s university area is in the Top Ten worst affected in the country

Numbers have grown since schools and university pupils have returned to campus. MP Ben Bradshaw has accused the Government of ‘forcing’ the University of Exeter to abandon its own ‘excellent’ coronavirus testing system as numbers continue to skyrocket.

The university has been using a 24-hour ‘Rapid Response’ system in conjunction with a company named Halo, which pledged to give results within 24 hours of a test.

This table shows the areas in England with the highest number of new cases up to October 2. Like Exeter many are in areas with a university campus. There was anger when hundreds of students were filmed in Exeter ignoring Coronavirus social distancing laws during Freshers week.

Today the nursery at Exeter College has shut until October 19 following a confirmed coronavirus case at the nursery at the rear of Queen Street in the city centre.

In Torbay the first coronavirus-related death in four months has been recorded as infections rise, particularly among younger people.

Director of public health Caroline Dimond reported that the elderly woman died this week – after figures were released showing no deaths in Devon and Cornwall. Ms Dimond said half of the most recent 118 cases were young people in the 15 to 39 age group.

Devon now has 40 Coronavirus (COVID-19) positive cases by Middle Super Output Area (MSOA) – and one of the top ten worst in England

Exeter

Pennsylvania & University 223

Central Exeter 55

St James’s Park & Hoopern 30

Cranbrook, Broadclyst & Stoke Canon 6

St Thomas West 4

Heavitree West & Polsloe 6

Mincinglake & Beacon Heath 5

Pinhoe & Whipton North 4

Clyst, Exton & Lympstone 9

“……..a terrible, expensive, time-consuming way to impose house building and worst of all threatened the destruction of the green belt”.

Да, Борис!

On the eve of the parliamentary debate on planning reform and house building targets, Owl is indebted to the work and researches of EDDC planners. Their excellent brief to Councillors draws attention, amongst other things, to the contrast between Tory policy in 2010 and now.

Housing requirements

There is already a standard Government method in place for calculating housing requirements across planning authorities in England, though this does not generate a high enough level of house building to meet Government aspirations. The white paper now advises that there will be “A new nationally determined, binding housing requirement that local planning authorities would have to deliver through their Local Plans.” 

This is quite a contrast to the position of the Conservative/Liberal democrat coalition Government when in 2010 Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles stated: “Communities will no longer have to endure the previous government’s failed Soviet tractor style top-down planning targets – they were a terrible, expensive, time-consuming way to impose house building and worst of all threatened the destruction of the green belt” .

For those contemplating taking part in the White Paper “Planning for the Future” consultation, which closes on October 29, Owl recommends reading the EDDC brief, to the 16 September strategic Planning Committee, pages 36 to 73. This provides a clear explanation of what lies behind the 27 questions and ideas on how to answer them from an EDDC perspective.

Some questions are not addressed such as  Q1 What three words do you associate most with the planning system in England? – A question, that in Owl’s opinion, trivialises a serious subject.

Not all questions have to be answered.

covid.joinzoe.com

On September 24th the NHS COVID-19 app launched across the UK, as part of the NHS Test and Trace service and NHS Wales Test, Trace, Protect service.

Since then we’ve had a lot of users of our COVID Symptom Study app asking us whether they should carry on logging daily they also have the NHS COVID-19 app.

The answer is yes! We need as many people as possible to download and use the COVID Symptom Study app daily as we head into the winter. The COVID Symptom Study app is a global public science project supported by the UK government and crowd-funding, with more than 4.2 million participants providing vital health data to help researchers and the NHS understand and beat COVID-19.

The NHS COVID-19 app supports the government’s efforts to control the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing.

COVID Symptom Study app and NHS COVID-19 app compared

COVID Symptom Study app

• Large-scale scientific project to understand and map COVID-19, providing estimated national and local COVID-19 cases based on algorithmic prediction

• Asks users to log daily health updates and records a wide range of symptoms
• Triggers an invitation to book a test if people report symptoms (including but not limited to the classic three) that might be caused by COVID-19

• Does not use your phone’s Bluetooth, GPS, location or contacts and does NOT track you as you move around
• Does not have QR code check-in
• Users can log on behalf of family and friends, including children and the elderly
• Supported by the UK government and delivered by ZOE, with research led by King’s College London

NHS COVID-19 app

• Part of the NHS Test and Trace service and NHS Wales Test, Trace, Protect service
• Basic symptom checker asking about key Coronavirus symptoms including; fever, cough and loss of smell/taste to determine if eligible for a test
• Allows eligible people (based on the three classic symptoms) to book a test through the NHS
• Uses Bluetooth to alert users who may have been in contact with another user who has tested positive
• Notifies users if they’ve been in ‘close contact’ with someone who then tests positive for coronavirus. The alert will not identify the individual in any way. A scientific calculation, using an “algorithm”, has been developed by scientists to work out which app users are ‘close contacts’.
• Allows users to check in to venues using a QR code
• Keeps track of users self-isolation countdown and gives access to relevant advice
• Users must be over 16 and cannot use the app on behalf of others\Supported by the UK government and delivered by the NHS

Let’s take a closer look.

About the COVID Symptom Study app

The COVID Symptom Study app is a large-scale scientific research project. More than 4 million users are using the app to regularly log their health and report any new symptoms, making it the largest public science project of its kind anywhere in the world.

Data from the COVID Symptom Study app is enabling researchers to monitor the spread of COVID-19 across the UK based on user postcodes, identifying hotspots sooner than any other method. It has also provided powerful insights into the disease and its symptoms, helping to identify who is most at risk.

The COVID Symptom Study is the largest data set in the world supporting scientific investigation of “long COVID”, and is supporting trials of vaccines and medicines for the disease. We are also using the app to investigate other scientific questions, such as the role of diet, vitamins and lifestyle in COVID-19.

The COVID Symptom Study app also provides daily updates on the estimated number of COVID-19 cases in the UK and your local area. These are calculated in two ways: firstly, the number and percentage of new positive swab tests – we now have results on over a million tests; and secondly by using our computer algorithm, which can predict whether someone is likely to have COVID-19 based on their symptoms.

In addition to the three ‘classic symptoms’, the COVID Symptom Study app monitors other potentially important signs of COVID-19. This includes headache, fatigue, gastrointestinal symptoms, confusion or skin rash, which may be especially relevant in the older population as well as children.

If people report any symptoms that might be COVID-19, the COVID Symptom Study app triggers an invitation to book a test for the virus. Although we do ask users to input the results of any COVID-19 tests they have had, which are then used to inform scientific research, the COVID Symptom Study app is not directly connected to the NHS Test and Trace service.

The COVID Symptom Study app does not have any contact tracing or QR check-in facilities. It cannot access your phone’s Bluetooth, GPS, location data or contacts, does not track you as you move around, and can’t tell if you have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for coronavirus.

The COVID Symptom Study app is a self-contained symptom reporting app created by doctors and scientists working in partnership with health science company ZOE. You can read more about how your data will be used, your rights and the steps we take to ensure it is protected in our privacy policy.

‍About the NHS COVID-19 app

The NHS COVID-19 app contains several tools aimed at controlling the spread of the disease.

Firstly, the NHS COVID-19 app has a simple symptom checker, allowing users to report if they are experiencing any of the three ‘classic’ symptoms of COVID-19: fever, cough, and loss of smell or taste. Users reporting any of the three key symptoms are invited to book a coronavirus test through the NHS Test and Trace website. If they test positive, they will be given advice on next steps and guidance on self-isolation timelines.

The NHS COVID-19 app uses Apple/ Google API exposure notification system which allows an app to measure the distance and duration between two devices, alerting users if someone they have been in close contact with later tests positive for the virus using random unique IDs. If any of those users later test positive for coronavirus, other app users they may have been in contact with will then receive an anonymised exposure alert with advice on what to do next.

Users are also able to use the NHS COVID-19 app to check in to venues such as bars and restaurants using a QR code and can use this to keep a record of where they’ve been.

The NHS app is based on Apple & Google’s privacy-preserving technology, and any data shared within the app is held on the user’s phone. It cannot access your phone’s location data, GPS or contacts. You can read the NHS COVID-19 app privacy policy here.

Use both apps to help us all get through the pandemic

We need as many people as possible to keep using the COVID Symptom Study app to monitor their health on a daily basis and contribute to vital research into the pandemic. You can also log on behalf of family and friends who aren’t able to use the app, including children and the elderly.

We need everyone to play their part to help us all get through this. We urge you to download and use both apps to help us get through COVID-19 over the months ahead.

‍

From the Evening Standard Oct 6

MP Halfon blasts Swire over ‘Jewish lobby’ comments

A SENIOR Tory MP has hit out at Sasha Swire’s controversial political memoir due to its references to the “Jewish lobby” in politics.

Swire, who is married to former Tory minister Hugo, caused waves last month with her book Diary of an MP’s Wife, a behind-the-scenes record of David Cameron’s government.

“Diarists are now allowed to talk about the so-called `Jewish lobby’ in Parliament with impunity with the recent book that has just come out,” Robert Halfon told a Conservative Party Conference fringe event yesterday. He chose not to name the book for fear of giving it more “publicity”.

Speaking more generally, the former education minister told The Londoner this morning: “People seem to be able to write things about the `Jewish lobby’ in a way that they would not dare with other ethnic groups. Jews are regarded as game sport.”

Halfon, who is Jewish, was speaking at a Board of Deputies of British Jews event called How Should We Be Combating Hate Online?

Swire’s book includes a reference to an “investigation into the Jewish lobby infiltrating Parliament”, and another use of the phrase.

Swire’s publisher was contacted for comment.

Another “Omnishambles” – No end in sight, they just keep piling up! – Owl

Francis Elliott, Political Editor www.thetimes.co.uk 

Business leaders awaiting a virtual Q&A with the prime minister and the chancellor were left staring at a buffering screen for almost an hour as technical glitches dogged the Conservatives’ “virtual conference”.

Some of the UK’s most senior industry figures were among those expecting to take part in an exclusive online question-and-answer session yesterday morning with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

The session, available to those businesses who paid for accreditation to the online conference, was delayed by at least 50 minutes.

The fact that it coincided with the government’s embarrassment over the data mishap that has delayed the tracing of tens of thousands of people possibly infected with Covid-19 did not go unremarked.

“The system has crashed meaning that various fee-paying business leader guests have spent the last 50 minutes looking at a screen with the Conservative logo and an uploading circle,” complained one industry leader. “It’s not a great advert for a government battling off allegations of technical incompetence in other areas.”

When the session did start it was repeatedly interrupted because of a “dreadful feed”, a guest said. Ministers’ “break-out” sessions yesterday afternoon were similarly bedevilled by technical glitches. “It’s been a complete shambles to be honest,” one disgruntled figure said.

Complaints over accreditation failures that left many frozen out of the first day of the conference have fuelled discontent. Although some have applauded a brave attempt to replicate the annual gathering, others say it has made painfully obvious the vacuity of much of the content of a conference which has a main purpose of raising cash from paying attendees and sponsors.

Cabinet ministers privately admit that participation in the event has been an afterthought and that planning has not been as meticulous as in previous years. The level of media coverage has disappointed Conservative Campaign Headquarters.

Yesterday’s buffering screens followed a notorious Zoom call last month with the prime minister and Tory MPs. Thanks to a technical failure Mr Johnson dropped off the call as he was seeking to defend his decision to break international law to change the Brexit deal.

MPs were unmuted and Michael Fabricant started singing Rule, Britannia! to fill the time. Colleagues did not join in.

The arch-Brexiteer Steve Baker quipped to the group that he could take over the call and chair it, to which Theresa May joined in the joke and said “no”.

The failures will sting at CCHQ which prides itself in being better at digital campaigning than Labour and the other parties. It was an early pioneer of social media advertising and spent considerable sums during last December’s elections on its digital content. One of Mr Johnson’s doorstep offers was better internet connectivity.

Lockdown was eased on a timetable with London in mind, leaving the north of England struggling to get cases down, according to northern leaders.

Charlotte Wace, Northern Correspondent | Kat Lay, Health Correspondent www.thetimes.co.uk 

Industrial areas, where most people do not have the option to work from home, and pockets of deprivation in which residents cannot afford to self-isolate have also played a role, health experts said.

According to Public Health England figures published late last week, the five areas with more than 200 cases per 100,000 population were in the north, where Covid-19 rates have remained stubbornly high despite local lockdowns. Newcastle upon Tyne had a rate of 250.5 per 100,000, Knowsley 246.7, Liverpool 239.3, Manchester 200.3, and St Helens 200.

The bottom end of the list featured southern councils: the Isle of Wight had only 4.2 cases per 100,000, Suffolk 6.1 and Dorset 7.7.

Admissions to hospital and deaths in hospital in the North West are rising rapidly and the number of coronavirus patients in the North West is eight times higher than those in the South East. Of 219 deaths in English hospitals in the week ending September 28, most were in the North East and Yorkshire, the North West and the midlands. Only 48 came from London, the South East, South West and East of England.

All ten of Greater Manchester’s boroughs have infection rates that are higher than those of Leicester when it went into local lockdown, despite weeks of restrictions on household gatherings.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, pointed to a table comparing cases in Greater Manchester with those in London. It showed that as schools reopened in June Greater Manchester still had a rate of 28.9 cases per 100,000 population, against 4.6 in London. When pubs reopened in July the figures were 13.4 and 3.2.

In a tweet on Saturday Mr Burnham said: “The timing of the lifting of national lockdown was London-centric. Please remember this the next time you see politicians pointing fingers at our people.”

Restrictions have also been in place for weeks in Lancashire but some boroughs still have high case numbers.

Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, insisted that localised restrictions were working and that, if ignored, they would be replaced by a blanket national lockdown. “If you look at places like Leicester or Luton who have had these restrictions and had them lifted, that shows there can be light at the end of the tunnel,” he told BBC Breakfast.

Sakthi Karunanithi, director of public health for Lancashire county council, said: “Hindsight always helps. We should have waited for a sustainable reduction in cases before introducing the lifting measures and just thinking about this as a blanket, ‘whole country in the same situation’ — which has never been the case — that has played a part.”

He added that existing measures did not seem “precise enough to target the behaviours causing the transmission”.

A further “massive disadvantage” had also been difficulties with the test-and-trace system that failed to give local health teams the resources to “blitz” the community with tests and support. “The underpinning issue is resources,” he said. “That argument has been made so many times but it feels like it is falling on deaf ears. They need to resource our efforts at a local level, properly supporting local teams to work with the national teams.”

Manchester says that a lot of its high case numbers are in student halls of residence but other parts of the region point to different factors.

Sarah McNulty, director of public health for Knowsley, said: “We know that we are a very deprived borough and the evidence tells us that means people have less choices. For instance, they are more likely to have low-paid front-facing jobs, and we don’t know if there are issues of having to work.”

Officials are starting to see more cases in the over-65s category, “which is a concern”.

More deprived areas nationally have been harder hit by Covid-19. The Office for National Statistics said that in July there were 3.1 deaths per 100,000 people living in the most deprived areas, compared with 1.4 per 100,000 in the most affluent.

At Westminster and around the country Tories are increasingly disillusioned with their leader. As one senior backbencher who voted for Mr Johnson in last year’s leadership contest puts it: “I’m not the only one who has got a severe case of buyer’s remorse.”

Rachel Sylvester www.thetimes.co.uk 

Boris Johnson should be addressing the Conservative conference this week as his party’s conquering hero, basking in the glory of having won an 80-seat majority at the general election and then got Brexit done. In fact, the prime minister, traditional darling of the grassroots, is fortunate to be speaking on a video link rather than in person because he might have received a less rapturous reception than normal. At Westminster and around the country Tories are increasingly disillusioned with their leader. As one senior backbencher who voted for Mr Johnson in last year’s leadership contest puts it: “I’m not the only one who has got a severe case of buyer’s remorse.”

By imposing tough coronavirus restrictions and threatening to break international law the prime minister has managed to unite Covid libertarians and constitutional liberals in opposition to his plans. There is also a more profound explanation for Mr Johnson’s increasingly dysfunctional relationship with his party. The Conservative leader is heading a government that is deeply unconservative and so it is not surprising that Tories from both left and right feel uncomfortable with his approach.

Conservatives instinctively want to conserve — the clue’s in the name — but this is an administration of disrupters. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s senior adviser, is not even a member of the Tory party and treats its elected representatives with contempt. Munira Mirza, Mr Johnson’s head of policy, used to write for Living Marxism, the in-house magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, had a picture of Vladimir Lenin on his office wall and shares his analysis that “sometimes history needs a shove”.

The risk-takers and radicals around Mr Johnson have rejected the traditional Tory respect for continuity and compromise in favour of creative destruction. Downing Street wants to “whack” the BBC, bash the impartial civil service, biff the judiciary and wage a “war on woke”. The prime minister and his aides float hair-raising “blue skies” ideas for wave machines in the Channel and “Operation Moonshot” mass coronavirus testing schemes.

What infuriates senior Tories most is that the Conservative emphasis on managerial capability and economic credibility has also been thrown out of the window by No 10. The extraordinary failure to report — and then trace the contacts of — almost 16,000 Covid-19 cases is only the latest “glitch” from a government that seems increasingly shambolic.

One veteran former cabinet minister and Tory peer denounces the “feckless incompetence” of the prime minister and his top team. “I am a Conservative but we don’t have a Conservative government,” he told me. “Conservatives believe in parliament, they don’t try to bypass it, Conservatives believe in the rule of law, they don’t announce to the House of Commons and the world that they are going to break the law. Conservatives believe in the Union and in trying to hold on to the best aspects of diplomacy like the Good Friday agreement. This is a bad English nationalist government with no idea of where it’s going.”

It is a political tension that also runs through the ministerial ranks. Jesse Norman, the financial secretary to the Treasury and biographer of the Conservative philosopher Edmund Burke — who favoured evolution over revolution — told the Bright Blue think tank at the weekend that “radical change” was “profoundly foolish”.

“Conservatism means acknowledging that institutions are wiser than individuals,” he said. “You could look at many institutions and call them relics of a bygone era, or you could see them for what they are: the product of innumerable compromises that contain a great deal of knowledge and wisdom. That we may fail to understand this is often due to our own limited understanding.” Whether deliberate or not, it was a clear rebuff to the Cummings approach.

In her book Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum writes that all over the world the new populist right “is more Bolshevik than Burkean: these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists”. Many of them were her friends — including Mr Johnson, who was in the Bullingdon Club at Oxford with her husband, Radek Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister. She describes the “burning resentment” harboured by right-wing ideologues in Poland against the old Communist establishment. “If you are someone who believes that you deserve to rule, then your motivation to attack the elite, pack the courts and warp the press to achieve your ambitions is strong,” she explains.

There is a similar political dynamic at work in this country. Lord Frost, the Brexit negotiator, was recently described to me as an “outsider-insider”, who had worked at the Foreign Office but was willing to challenge its assumptions. “His attitude is: these people never valued me and now I’m back and screw you, I’m in charge,” says one Whitehall source.

You could say that this is a government of outsider-insiders who harbour a grudge against an establishment that they think never took them seriously enough. Mr Johnson was dismissed as a joker, then had the last laugh by getting to No 10. Suella Braverman, the attorney-general, casts herself as the victim of a liberal progressive legal elite when she started as a young barrister in London. She was, she said, “the shy Tory in my chambers of ‘right-on’ human rights lawyers” who overcame the “social stigma” to become a Conservative. Priti Patel, the home secretary, lashed out at “leftie lawyers” thwarting the government’s attempts to control the asylum system. Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, describes herself as a “freedom fighter” standing up to the health and environmental police.

This is the myth the Vote Leave crew have built around themselves: that they are the plucky Brexit-supporting Davids taking on the Remain Goliath. Many of them are, in fact, part of the elite they purport to despise. Mr Johnson was educated at Eton, Mr Cummings’s father-in-law owns a castle, Rishi Sunak went to Winchester College. More importantly they are now in power. The outsiders have become the insiders, populating the corridors of power with their friends and political allies just as their predecessors did — their very own Brexit “blob”.

The anti-establishment radicals are the establishment these days and it turns out that they’re not very good at it. Being responsible for running things is, they have discovered, a lot harder than railing against the status quo. “It’s all very well bashing and dismantling everything but you have got to know what you are putting in its place,” one senior Tory says. “What’s your vision for how it should work? It’s easy to say what’s wrong, it’s difficult to put it right. The lack of competence is what’s really bothering everyone and the problem is now they’re in charge they haven’t got anyone else to blame.”

“It was offshore wind that puffed the sails of Drake and Raleigh and Nelson, and propelled this country to commercial greatness.”

Boris Johnson expected to shoot the breeze in his conference speech today.

[There is also the small matter of the Sizewell “C” nuclear power plant to consider – Owl]

Fiona Harvey www.theguardian.com 

Boris Johnson will promise to power every home in the UK with offshore wind energy within a decade, pledging to make the coronavirus pandemic a catalyst for green growth.

In a speech to the virtual Conservative party conference on Tuesday [today], he will say that the government will invest in a clean energy future to create “hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jobs” in the next decade.

The prime minister said the UK would “become the world leader in low-cost clean power generation – cheaper than coal and gas”, comparing the UK’s resources in offshore wind to Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth.

“We believe that in 10 years’ time offshore wind will be powering every home in the country, with our target rising from 30 gigawatts to 40 gigawatts,” he will say. “Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle – the whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands.”

The government has come under fire in recent months for failing to set out plans for a green recovery that would put the UK on track to meet its goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Apart from £3bn for insulating homes, there were no green measures in the Covid-19 recovery plan.

No 10 said the pledge was the first step in a 10-point “Build Back Greener” plan, which the prime minister would set out later in the year and includes new targets and investment into industries, innovation and infrastructure.

The prime minister made no mention of onshore wind, which is the cheapest form of wind energy, but has been subject to stringent planning regulations brought in under David Cameron, which have meant few onshore turbines have been built in the UK in the last five years.

Johnson will say that the government will invest £160m in manufacturing the next generation of turbines, including floating windmills capable of delivering 1GW of energy by 2030, over 15 times the current floating offshore volumes worldwide.

Downing Street said the initial investment would rapidly create about 2,000 construction jobs and enable the sector to support up to 60,000 jobs directly and indirectly by 2030 in ports, factories and the supply chains.

“Far out in the deepest waters we will harvest the gusts, and by upgrading infrastructure in places like Teesside and Humber and Scotland and Wales we will increase an offshore wind capacity that is already the biggest in the world,” Johnson is expected to say.

“As Saudi Arabia is to oil, the UK is to wind – a place of almost limitless resource, but in the case of wind without the carbon emissions and without the damage to the environment.”

In a tacit acknowledgment of how wind power has been controversial among the Conservative grassroots, Johnson said it had been used throughout key moments of British history.

“I remember how some people used to sneer at wind power 20 years ago and say that it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding,” he will say. “It was offshore wind that puffed the sails of Drake and Raleigh and Nelson, and propelled this country to commercial greatness.”

Johnson said the target would help the UK reach its target of net zero by 2050 – a target which has been criticised by campaigners as under-ambitious.

Downing Street said new floating offshore technology would allow windfarms to be built further out to sea in deeper waters, boosting capacity even further where winds are strongest and ensuring the UK remains at the forefront of the next generation of clean energy.

The boost for offshore wind was welcomed by green campaigners, who urged him to go further with his plans by providing incentives for electric vehicles and other low-carbon infrastructure.

Caterina Brandmayr, head of climate at the Green Alliance thinktank, said: “A green recovery is the best way to create jobs in every part of the UK, to lead the world in tackling climate change, and to protect our precious natural world. The race is now on for the government and British businesses to replicate the success story of offshore wind in electric vehicles, smart grid technology and future-proofed homes.”

John Sauven, executive director at Greenpeace UK, said: “If carried through, [the commitment] would help cement the UK’s global leadership in this key technology. But delivering 40 gigawatts of power on to the grid by 2030 requires action in this parliament. We now need to see the prime minister’s newly found enthusiasm is followed through by knocking down all the barriers that the offshore wind industry faces in delivering its ambition.”

The UK is set to chair the next round of UN climate talks, Cop26, which have been delayed from November to next year because of the pandemic.

Later this autumn, Johnson is expected to accelerate the shift to electric vehicles, another step in the planned green economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision to end the sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030 would put the UK ahead of France, which has a 2040 ban in the pipeline, and in line with Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. Norway will bring in a ban in 2025.

The announcement of the Build Back Greener plan is tentatively scheduled for November and is expected to follow the advice set out by the Committee on Climate Change, including support for the UK’s nascent clean hydrogen industry to help cut carbon emissions from homes and heavy industry.

Campaigners have launched legal action against the government over its decision to award a contract to a lobbying and PR firm co-founded by an ally of Dominic Cummings without a competitive tender during the pandemic.

David Pegg www.theguardian.com 

A group of lawyers is challenging the Cabinet Office’s decision to give the contract to Hanbury Strategy, which was co-founded by Paul Stephenson, who worked alongside Cummings as the director of communications during the 2016 Vote Leave campaign.

In legal papers lodged in the high court, the Good Law Project accused the Cabinet Office, headed by Michael Gove, of apparent bias and favouritism in giving the £580,000 contract to Hanbury.

Hanbury was the fourth Tory-linked firm known to have been awarded work during the pandemic under emergency procedures that permit public bodies to give contracts to commercial firms without asking other firms to bid for the work.

News of the legal challenge has emerged as the Guardian can report that the Cabinet Office is refusing to disclose any documents under the Freedom of Information Act that would explain what was discussed at an official meeting between Gove and Hanbury on 6 February.

The Cabinet Office said disclosure of the documents “would weaken ministers’ ability to discuss controversial and sensitive topics free from premature public scrutiny”. The only information that has been made public by the Cabinet Office about the meeting is that it was about “the Union and devolution”.

Hanbury was set up in 2016 by Stephenson and Ameet Gill, David Cameron’s strategy director in Downing Street, and gives political and communications advice to firms. Stephenson was one of the first people to be recruited by Cummings to work on the 2016 Brexit campaign, according to one account.

The Cabinet Office hired Hanbury on 16 March, just before the lockdown, to carry out polling to gauge public opinion during the pandemic. The work ended in July.

The Good Law Project, a not-for-profit group that aims to use legal methods to expose wrongdoing, is seeking to have the decision to give the contract to Hanbury declared unlawful.

The Good Law Project alleged that the government had clearly broken its mandatory obligation to make public the contract within 30 days, as required under official guidelines. The contract only came to light last month through a freedom of information request by the Guardian.

Government lawyers are resisting the lawsuit, arguing that the group has no legal right to take legal action as it is not a rival company that has lost out on the opportunity to win the contract. “It is merely a campaigning group with no special interest in the communications sector,” they said.

They argued the Good Law Project has initiated six other lawsuits against the government over the awarding of contracts to commercial firms during the pandemic. They “strongly contested” the group’s right to take any of these lawsuits.

In another lawsuit, the group is alleging that the Cabinet Office was also biased when it gave a £840,000 contract to a company owned by two long-term associates of Gove and Cummings, without putting the work out for tender. The contract to research public opinion about government policies was given to Public First, a small policy and research company.

The Treasury also awarded a three-month £68,000 contract to Hanbury to carry out polling without a competitive tender.

A government spokesperson said official guidelines allowed it to award contracts to firms without a competitive tender during national emergencies. The research conducted by Hanbury had helped to make official messages more effective, it added.

Hanbury has said its team included some of the UK’s leading experts in polling and data strategy.

Covid.joinzoe.com October 1

According to the COVID Symptom Study (CSS) UK Infection Survey figures, there are currently, 19,777 daily new symptomatic cases of COVID in the UK on average over the two weeks up to 27 September (excluding care homes). This figure is based on the number of newly symptomatic app users per day, and the proportion of these who give positive swab tests. The latest figures were based on the data from 8,377 swab tests done between 13 September to 27 September.

This week’s data shows that the number of new cases of COVID-19 in the UK has flattened across the UK in the last four days, with the highest numbers still in the North of England suggesting that the situation is slowing down. The CSS Infection Survey found that almost twice as many people under 30 were reporting positive tests (0.49%) compared to the prevalence rate for people above or equal to 30 (0.26%). This higher level of cases in younger people could explain why there is currently less pressure on the NHS compared to the first wave.

The CSS UK Infection Survey R values for the UK are; England 1.2, Scotland 1.3 and Wales 1.4. These R values have fallen since last week which reflects the slowing down of new cases being observed.  

Although new cases may be not rising, we estimate that 230,966 people currently have symptomatic COVID in the UK (prevalent disease), This figure does not include long term COVID sufferers.

The CSS UK Infection Survey has been running since early May when the COVID Symptom Study commenced its daily swab testing programme provided by the Department of Health and Social Care and has so far recorded over a million swab results from app users. The CCS UK Infection Survey estimates the number of current COVID-19 positive cases in the community based on the information logged by users in the app and the results from the swab testing programme.

It identifies differences in numbers within the regions throughout the UK, and tracks the change in estimated cases over time. It is the largest survey of its kind in the UK, bigger than the ONS’s COVID-19 Infection Survey and the research conducted by Imperial College London.

The COVID Symptom Study app is a not-for-profit initiative that was launched at the end of March 2020 to support vital COVID-19 research. The app was launched by health science company ZOE with scientific analysis provided by King’s College London. With 4 million contributors globally, the Study is the world’s largest ongoing study of COVID-19.

Tim Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London, comments:

“We are confident that this flattening in the data looks real and that this might be an early sign of infection rates slowing down. This may be due to a number of factors including social distancing and the “rule of six”, but we can’t discount the role of less susceptible people and prior immunity in those exposed and the natural cycle of the virus. We are seeing nearly 50% of our cases are coming from the under 30s, which is more than in the spring, which may explain why the pressures on the NHS are less. We still need to continue to work together to make sure this flattening off isn’t a small blip. As we head into winter we all need to be cautious and pay attention to the advice we are being given around local restrictions, social distancing and avoiding gathering in large groups. ”

Eighteen affordable homes will be built in a Pembrokeshire village thanks to a grant funded by council tax premiums on second homes.

www.bbc.co.uk

A community land trust in Solva will work with the county council and a housing association on the project.

Councillor Bob Kilmister, cabinet member for finance, said the land trust project was “ground breaking and the first of its type in Wales”.

A football field earmarked for the development will be replaced elsewhere.

The 18 homes will be designed and allocated to residents by housing association Ateb, in collaboration with the trust, with rural development organisation Planed also involved.

Council leaders heard that the development would “seek to ensure the scale and design of the housing is acceptable to the community”.

Mr Kilmister said that the community fully backed the plan for “much needed” affordable housing in the area and welcomed the innovative scheme.

“It’s slightly more complicated because there is no ‘road map’ [for such a project] available and we have had to create one,” he said.

The cabinet member for housing, councillor Michelle Bateman, said it was exactly the type of partnership the authority wanted to be involved in, saying it added “another arm” to housing provision.

Pembrokeshire’s cabinet also approved the long lease of land owned by the authority alongside the A487 at Bro Dawel for the development, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

A council tax premium of 50% on second homes in Pembrokeshire was introduced during 2017-18 while a 25% premium on properties empty for three years or more followed in 2019-20.

Sarah Wollaston www.independent.co.uk 

The government website strikes a reassuring note: the NHS Test and Trace service ensures that anyone who develops symptoms of coronavirus can be tested quickly to find out if they have the virus, and help to trace close recent contacts of anyone who tests positive to notify them that they must self-isolate at home.  

This rhetoric is far removed from the reality. Even the name is wrong. It isn’t an “NHS” operation at all, but was farmed out to private interests with little or no experience, and with predictable consequences. Yet from the outset there were clear warnings not to bypass the expertise of local directors of public health.  

The government are running out of scapegoats for the latest incompetence as we discover that, far from infections levelling out, results were somehow being lost in space. Perhaps this is what the prime minister meant by a moonshot?  

Even employing Johnson’s other metaphor, closer to planet earth, how can you “whack a mole” if you don’t know where the moles are surfacing? We now know that 15,841 confirmed cases surfaced over the past week without being counted, let alone passed on to contact tracing. Of those, almost 12,000 missed the timeframe where contact tracing and isolation would have had the greatest potential for reducing the risk of further spread. That, after all, is the whole point of test and trace. It also matters when it comes to understanding where the infection is spreading and which groups are most affected in order to prioritise local measures.  

The problems do not only relate to the issue of reporting, but also, for too many people, to simply tracing a test in the first place. I know of people still being directed from Devon to South Wales for example, only to find on closer inspection of the website that the test centre is in an area of local lockdown and only open to local residents. Few will risk driving 200 miles each way to a test centre, especially if they are feeling unwell, if they fear they will be asked to turn around when they get there.  

The same concerns apply to those being asked to increase the viral load of their own exposure to infection whilst driving an infected individual too unwell to get there themselves. Many people are simply deciding to delay or, more worryingly still, not to take a test at all, with serious consequences for areas where the disease may be accelerating unnoticed.

Overpromising and underdelivering has long been the hallmark of the government’s handling of the pandemic, be that on the failure to protect nursing home residents and staff, our dismal record on excess deaths and even on the roll-out of the contact tracing app.  

The sad truth is that the only thing “world beating” about test and trace, as for so many other aspects of their response, has been the government’s incompetence, and failure of ministers to be held to account.

Sarah Wollaston is the former MP for Totnes and immediate past chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee

Littering is an issue for communities up and down the country.

By Tom Gibbon www.inyourarea.co.uk

InYourArea

We’re asking you to take part in our quick questionnaire

Littering is an issue for communities up and down the country.

It’s also something we at InYourArea want taken far more seriously and is why we’ve partnered with Clean Up Britain for the Don’t Trash Our Future campaign.

But while most of us attempt to make the best of the difficult times we all currently find ourselves in, it seems a careless minority still hold the belief that others should clear up after them.

We’re asking you to take part in our quick survey below – or here – to help us understand if littering has got worse during the pandemic, particularly with discarded facemasks becoming a more and more common sight.

You can also help by supporting Don’t Trash Our Future and signing our petition. We’re aiming for 100,000 signatures so we can lobby for changes we and Clean Up Britian believe will help tidy up our country.

The campaign has two main aims – to raise the maximum on-the-spot fine for littering to £1,000 and to make it compulsory that councils enforce the law on littering in their areas.

You can sign the petition here.

Proposals to ‘stitch back together Britain’s tattered natural fabric of wild land’ have been adopted by East Devon District Council (EDDC).

Daniel Clark eastdevonnews.co.uk 

Wildflowers in West Hill. Picture: Claire Wright

Cabinet members last week unanimously backed eight recommendations aimed at improving biodiversity and natural habitats through ‘re-wilding’ and implementing nature recovery corridors.

These will be adopted across the district as part of the authority’s Climate Change Strategy, writes Local Democracy Reporter Daniel Clark.

Members heard the plans are part of a bid to develop a ‘nature recovery network’.

The concept will allow wildlife to thrive and plants, animals, seeds, nutrients and water to move from place to place enabling the natural world to adapt to change.

EDDC’s strategic lead for housing, health and environment John Golding told the meeting that, among the measures, the council would identify a suitable re-wilding site in every East Devon town within a year.

He said in a report: “To recover, wildlife cannot be confined to nature reserves.

“We should create a nature recovery network that extends into every part of our towns, villages and countryside, bringing wildlife and the benefits of a healthy natural world into every part of life.

“Letting flowers bloom along road verges, installing green roofs across our skylines, planting more street trees to give people shady walks in the summer, encouraging whole communities to garden for wild plants and animals – it’s time to stitch back together Britain’s tattered natural fabric of wild land.

“In doing so, we will not only help nature recover, but enable even more people to experience our natural world.”

Mr Golding’s report highlighted existing successes such as Exmouth long grass areas that have been created in Phear Park, Brixington Park and at the St John’s Road playing field.

Wildflower areas established in The Byes, Sidmouth, were also praised.

Mr Golding added: “In some areas we may experience a proliferation of litter, dog mess, and create vision barriers on road verges.

“Re-wilding will not be appropriate at every space and there will always remain a need to keep some areas cut tight with short grass giving a more manicured appearance.”

Councillor Denise Bickley told the meeting: “This is really forward-thinking, focused, and draws so many sources of information together and is easy to follow.

“For relatively little spend, and it could even save us money, with the environment at the fore, we will see improvements.

“We need to be transparent about what we are doing and why we are doing it, as looking after the environment no longer means cutting the grass and keeping it tidy. We are setting a great initiative here.”

Cllr Marianne Rixson added: “Nature has an amazing ability to recover, we just need to give it a chance.”

Ed Dolphin of Sidmouth Arboretum, said: “There is a need for action. The natural environment is in crisis.”

Cabinet members agreed to:

• Extending coverage of nature recovery networks and re-wilding projects, carefully defining our aspirations;
• Working through green spaces identified in the council’s Green Space Plan and assessing whether they are suitable for recovery/re-wilding;
• Identifying a suitable re-wilding site in every East Devon town as an exemplar within a year;
• Identifying areas of housing land suitable for nature recovery and/or re-wilding and consulting with tenants with proposals;
• Mapping and recording areas identified for recovery/re-wilding and monitoring the benefits arising from the process;
• Establishing an improved understanding of the position of fauna and flora species in the district;
• Establishing a campaign to promote the benefits of re-wilding in a range of settings;
• Establishing a project group, adopting the guiding principles, and specifying what constitutes re-wilding and how this can be achieved in the district.

Mr Golding added: “We should operate a properly-orchestrated campaign and actively promote re-wilding, encouraging gardeners and people with small green spaces to participate in re-wilding, recognising the value that all natural spaces can contribute towards the diversification goal.

“We also need to be working with partners and landowners as there are many groups who share our ambitions and we should be working with the Devon Wildlife Trust, Clinton Devon, AONB managers, Jurassic Coast Trust, allotments, farmers to name just a few.

“Collectively there is a large and influential group of partners here that could make a transformational difference to the project, and there are opportunities in people’s private gardens and how they form part of the overall wildlife matrix.”

Guided by the science……………………

1. Choose a start time
2. Select target group
3. Choose a new rule

Boris Johnson’s reputation among Conservative members has plunged to a record low, it has emerged, as the party enters its annual conference facing accusations of a “chumocracy” at the top of government.

[But not all gloom for Boris. Party members’ verdict: not quite as useless as Gavin Williamson – Owl]

Michael Savage www.theguardian.com

With Tory MPs restless over the government’s performance, which has seen it lose a huge poll lead over Labour since the start of the pandemic, the prime minister has recorded his first ever negative satisfaction rating among a survey of Tory members on the ConservativeHome website. He recorded the second-lowest score of any cabinet member, with only education secretary Gavin Williamson performing worse.

The prime minister will attempt to use the virtual party conference this week to try to relaunch his premiership by looking to the programme he wants to pursue beyond the Covid crisis, which has dominated his time in Downing Street.

It comes as his performance has been tested again during a series of regional television interviews, in which he appeared to forget key facts about his hospital spending programme and struggled to explain how residents across the north of England should regard the local Covid 19 restrictions they face.

Asked how much hospital investment would come to Leeds during an interview with BBC Yorkshire’s Look North, Johnson scrambled for notes on the floor and asked aides for the figure before apologising for not having it to hand.

He also appeared to struggle to explain the rules in different parts of the north west, during another disjointed interview with ITV Granada Reports. Asked whether or not certain activities were allowed, he suggested people did not have to strictly follow local lockdown rules as long as they “show common sense”.

Asked if someone in Wirral could go for a walk in the park with someone from another house, Johnson said it could be all right as long as they used social distancing. However, the interviewer pointed out that social mixing between households in the area was against government advice.

Johnson added: “Provided people show common sense and they look on the local websites – that is the best way to get this virus down.”

Johnson is facing concerns from different wings of his party. While the libertarian wing is increasingly concerned that Covid restrictions remain too severe, figures on the modernising wing are concerned about radical plans to breach international law regarding the European Union, and to confront the BBC – an agenda they attribute to Johnson’s senior adviser, Dominic Cummings.

Jesse Norman, a Treasury minister, warned that Conservatives should be wary of tearing down institutions. “The difficulty with the revolutionary position is that human beings are remarkably bad at making radical decisions that prove to be wise in the long term,” he told the Bright Blue think tank’s magazine. “Conservatism also means acknowledging that institutions are wiser than individuals. You could look at many institutions and call them relics of a bygone era, or you could see them for what they are, the product of innumerable compromises that contain a great deal of knowledge and wisdom.”

Justine Greening, the former education secretary, writes in the Observer today that many voters still regarded the Tories as being “dominated by the voices of privilege and chumocracy, more than those representing the party of effort and reward; that it protects the monied, vested interests that bankroll the party, ahead of the interests of the public; that too often government roles seem handed out based on who knows whom, rather than who knows what”.

However, other senior figures in the party are trying to take a longer-term view. “Looking back at the things we’ve gone through in the last 18 months, some of them feel like 18 years ago,” said one minister. “By the spring, if Covid is looking better, the economy is picking up and the Bond movie is finally out, things could look very different.”

Johnson’s team are keen to return to the themes he backed during his early weeks in power, such as the “levelling up” agenda. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Commons leader, has written to the cabinet to ask for “bold and ambitious bills” ahead of the next Queen’s speech in the spring.

The programme is set to include a criminal justice bill, a controversial planning bill to speed up development and house building, an animal welfare bill and a plan to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act – a move that will again give No 10 control over the timing of the next election.

A No 10 spokesman said: “The prime minister has been clear that we will not be blown off course in our plans to build back better, and that’s just what our next Queen’s speech will do.”

A new three-tier lockdown system is being planned for England, with leaked government documents paving the way for potential harsher restrictions including the closure of pubs and a ban on all social contact outside of household groups.

Heather Stewart http://www.theguardian.com 

The draft traffic-light-style plan, seen by the Guardian, is designed to simplify the current patchwork of localised restrictions, which apply to about a quarter of the UK. It also reveals tougher measures that could be imposed by the government locally or nationally if Covid cases are not brought under control.

On Sunday the number of cases jumped by 22,961 after it emerged that more than 15,000 test results had not previously been transferred on to computer systems, including for contact tracers.

Called the “Covid-19 Proposed Social Distancing Framework” and dated 30 September, it has not yet been signed off by No 10 and measures could still be watered down.

Alert level 3 – the most serious – contains tougher measures than any seen so far in local lockdowns since the start of the pandemic. They include:

• Closure of hospitality and leisure businesses.
• No social contact outside your household in any setting.
• Restrictions on overnight stays away from home.
• No organised non-professional sports permitted or other communal hobby groups and activities, such as social clubs in community centres.
• Places of worship can remain open.

Schools are not mentioned in the draft. A government source said this was because Boris Johnson had made clear that classroom closures would be a last resort and the reopening of schools was considered within Whitehall to have been a relative success.

Any attempts to impose more stringent measures are expected to provoke renewed anger among Conservative backbenchers, who are likely to demand a vote in parliament should they come into force.

A government source said the measures in the draft document, particularly those under alert level 3, had not been finalised and the document still needed to be approved by ministers in the Covid-operations committee and by the prime minister.

Marked “official – sensitive”, it says the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) has advised that a package of measures, rather than single changes, will be most effective in controlling the spread of the virus.

“Preventing household mixing and closing businesses and venues in which there is close social interaction was recommended as the best way to reduce R,” it says, referring to the rate of infection that the government aims to keep below 1.

The three-tier system should improve compliance with the rules: “Research tells us that people would welcome a clearer and simpler structure to the advice and rules that they should follow,” it says, acknowledging that “many people do not have a clear understanding of the rules that apply to them”.

The document says that alert level 3 would be “triggered in geographical areas or nationally when alert level 2 measures have not contained the spread of the virus, or where there has been a significant rise in transmission”.

Under alert level 2, people must not meet others outside of their household in private dwellings or gardens, apart from their support bubble, or in pubs, restaurants or other settings. Level 2 will be “triggered in geographical areas or nationally when there has been a rise in transmission, which cannot be contained through local responses”.

Visiting care homes will only be allowed in exceptional circumstances and travel should be limited to essential purposes, though holidays are permitted within households.

People can continue to play organised team sports. Weddings are limited to 15 attendees and receptions would not be permitted, with funeral numbers also slashed from 30 to 15 attendees.

Alert level 1 contains restrictions currently in place across England, including the “rule of six” for gatherings indoor and out, the wearing of face-coverings, the 10pm curfew on hospitality businesses and numbers limited to 15 at weddings and 30 at funerals.

A Whitehall source said the levels were intended to be “minimum standards” and specific local circumstances would also be taken into account.

Downing Street declined to comment. A government source said it was an “early draft and proposals are still being considered by ministers”.

The shadow health secretary, Jon Ashworth, said Labour had long called for a simplification of the rules and said ministers must now make clear the criteria that would be applied to put areas into different alert levels.

“Vast swathes of the north of England and the Midlands are under a form of lockdown with a myriad of different rules applying,” Ashworth said. “In recent days, Boris Johnson got himself into an utter muddle over these rules, confirming that the ad hoc way in which decisions are made causes confusion.”

Johnson recently had to apologise for suggesting people could meet in pub gardens in north-east England after misinterpreting the rules – a mistake that a cabinet minister blamed on a “gotcha” question.

Ashworth said that the lockdowns meant “unanswered questions about the upcoming school half-term or Christmas” and said that families needed to know their area was being treated fairly and getting support.

“Keir Starmer has called for clear criteria to apply when an area goes into lockdown and how it escapes. Ministers are now admitting how confusing their approach has been,” he said.

A Department of Health spokesman said: “We are seeing coronavirus cases rise at a rapid rate across the country and, given how serious this virus is, it is vital everyone plays their part by following the rule of six, washing their hands, practising social distancing and wearing a mask in enclosed spaces.

“As we have shown, we are prepared to take action decisively when it is necessary, and it is of course right to look how we make sure everyone understands and complies with the restrictions that will keep us all safe.”

The ERS and groups representing elderly voters and BME communities are warning that mandatory voter ID risks pulling up the drawbridge to thousands of voters, after the government confirmed plans to impose the ‘show your papers’ policy.

Author: Electoral Reform Society www.electoral-reform.org.uk 

In the government’s response to the Electoral Commission’s reports on last year’s elections – out this week – Cabinet Office minister Chloe Smith confirmed she plans to push ahead with imposing mandatory voter ID, writing: “We are concentrating on the promises we made in our manifesto including to ensure electoral integrity by introducing voter ID and bringing forward changes to strengthen postal vote processes and to equalise constituencies amongst other changes.”

The report responds to a challenge from the Association of Electoral Administrators which argued that voter ID was unnecessarily ‘introducing more complexity’ to an ‘already creaking system’.

There was just one proven case of personation fraud, out of millions of votes cast in the UK last year, according to the Electoral Commission.

Today, we are urging the government to re-think the voter ID policy.

We know that the government’s voter-ID proposals will disproportionately hit older voters, people of colour, and those on low-incomes. Experience from the US shows that when there’s no universal ID scheme, these laws unfairly – and often deliberately – lock millions out of the ballot box, skewing the system and deepening political inequalities. We must not import US-style voter suppression to the UK.

Voting is a right and one you shouldn’t have to opt into. Rather than pulling up the drawbridge to large groups of voters, ministers should deal with bringing in the nine million people who are missing from the electoral register, and the dangerous loopholes in our analogue-age election laws.

Given the huge potential for disenfranchisement, it is deeply worrying that ministers see imposing voter ID as a priority – rather than reforming Westminster’s warped voting system or unelected House of Lords. When it comes to Britain’s democratic crisis, this isn’t just fiddling while Rome burns – it’s pouring petrol on the flames. It’s vital that ministers think again before driving another wedge into our already-unequal politics.

Dennis Reed, Director of Silver Voices, which represents people over-60s, told the news outlet Byline: “We fear this is a ‘Trumpian’ manoeuvre to limit voting by those who are not natural Government supporters – i.e. the most deprived members of communities, including senior citizens in poverty.”

Josh Bradlow, policy manager at Stonewall, added: “LGBT people – particularly those who are working-class, older, disabled, and people of colour – are more likely than the general population to live in poverty or experience homelessness, which can create significant obstacles to obtaining photo ID. Many trans and non-binary people also may not have ID matching their gender.”

Anti-racism group Hope Not Hate described mandatory voter ID as “a cure that is worse than the sickness.” 

A spokesperson for Liberty added: “The Government has given us plenty of reasons to be wary of its digital projects. Recent months have seen backtracks over the planned contract tracing app and exams algorithm, and only last year the Home Office had to apologise to EU nationals and Windrush citizens in the space of a week for data breaches.”

BME groups have also accused the government of importing US-style voter suppression.

Last year’s voter ID pilots in just a handful of council areas saw over 700 people turned away and not return – effectively being denied a vote.

The government may have also misled Parliament over the policy. A series of Freedom of Information requests revealed that government departments do not know who will be hardest hit by mandatory voter ID plans, despite ministers repeatedly claiming that “the evidence shows there is no impact on any particular demographic group.”

This policy risks turning thousands of election workers into bouncers at the ballot box – the government needs to re-think the voter ID policy.

Sign our petition to protect your right to vote

Coronavirus looks set to have a lasting impact on office use, new figures from the Institute of Directors reveal.

Institute of Directors www.iod.com 

In a survey of close to a thousand company directors conducted last month, nearly three quarters (74%) said they would be keeping increased home-working after coronavirus. Furthermore, more than half of those polled said their organisation intended to reduce their long-term use of workplaces. More than one in five reported their usage would be significantly lower.

Among those who had been using their workplace less before the change in Government recommendation last month, more than four in ten said that working from home was proving more effective than their previous set-up.

Business leaders surveyed had been making a number of other adjustments during the pandemic that they intended to keep in place. 43% had embraced greater use of flexible working such as compressed hours, while over a fifth had moved a service they provided online.

The IoD warned that the prospect of increased home-working over the long-term could raise legal questions around employers’ responsibilities for staff outside the office. The Institute also argued that the Government should take a number of steps to help SMEs and the economy adapt to increased home-working:

• Improve SME tax incentives, enabling more small firms to harness new digital technologies and bolster the productivity of home-working. This could be achieved by expanding the scope of R&D tax reliefs, as proposed in the 2019 Conservative Manifesto.
• Improve access to leadership and management training, to reduce concerns around the potential impact of remote working on productivity and employee wellbeing. Boosting management skills could be one target of the National Skills Fund.
• Lower employment costs, particularly Employers’ NICs to encourage job creation among businesses and help more firms retain staff. This could be done by increasing the Employment Allowance or raising the threshold for paying National Insurance Contributions. 

958 company directors were surveyed between 11-31 September.

Roger Barker, Director of Policy at the IoD, said:

“Remote working has been one of the most tangible impacts of coronavirus on the economy. For many, it could be here to stay.

“Working from doesn’t work for everyone, and directors must be alive to the downsides. Managing teams remotely can prove far from straightforward, and directors must make sure they are going out of their way to support employees’ mental wellbeing.

“The UK has long needed to up its game when it comes to management skills, and the pandemic has only made this more pressing. It’s crucial that the Government targets this key area, ensuring businesses and their people can make use of accessible courses that reflect their skills needs.

“Any remote-working set-up is only as good as the technology that enables it. Alongside continued investment in digital infrastructure, the Government should give small firms the headroom to invest in the latest equipment and software. The restrictions have spurred significant innovation, but low revenues and high costs could put a lid on this.

“The benefits of the office haven’t gone away. For many companies, bringing teams together in person proves more productive and enjoyable. Shared workspace often provides employees the opportunity for informal development and networking that is so crucial, particularly early on in a career.

“Looking ahead, it seems more and more companies will take a blended approach to where they work. Any transition can cause challenges, and the Government should look to ease this. In the long run, greater flexibility could benefit both business and worker alike. However, it’s crucial that the legal and economic implications of this change are grappled with from the start.”

Full survey results

958 respondents, conducted between 11-31 September 2020.

Relative to before the COVID-19 pandemic, which of the following best describes your organisation’s intended level of ‘workplace’ use in the long-term?

Have you made any of the following changes to your organisation due to the pandemic that you intend to now keep in place?

621 respondents, conducted 11-24 September:

Which of the following are the main reasons for the current reduced use of your workplace?