Under the plan over-40s would have to pay more in tax or national insurance, or be compelled to insure themselves against hefty bills for care when they are older. The money raised would then be used to pay for the help that frail elderly people need with washing, dressing and other activities if still at home, or to cover their stay in a care home.

The plans are being examined by Boris Johnson’s new health and social care taskforce and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). They are gaining support as the government’s answer to the politically perilous question of who should pay for social care.

Sources say the principle of over-40s meeting the cost of a reformed system of care for the ageing population is emerging as the government’s preferred option for fulfilling the prime minister’s pledge just over a year ago to “fix the crisis in social care once and for all”. Social care is a devolved matter but the plans could apply to the whole of the UK as they may involve the tax system.

Matt Hancock, the health and social care secretary, is a keen advocate of the plan. He has been championing it in discussions that have resumed recently about the government’s proposals to overhaul social care. Officials say there is a “renewed urgency” in Downing Street and the DHSC to come up with a solution.

The system that officials are considering is a modified version of how Japan and Germany fund social care. Both are widely admired for having created a sustainable way of financing social care to deal with the rising needs an ageing population brings.

In Japan everyone starts contributing once they reach 40. In Germany everyone pays something towards that cost from the time they start working, and pensioners contribute too. Currently 1.5% of every person’s salary, and a further 1.5% from employers or pension funds, are ringfenced to pay for care in later life.

Older people in Germany who have had their needs assessed can use the money to pay carers to help them with personal tasks at home, or for care home fees or even to give to relatives and friends for helping to look after them.

Adopting a similar approach would let Johnson say he has ended the situation whereby some pensioners deemed too wealthy to qualify for local council-funded care have to sell their homes to pay care home costs, which can exceed £1,400 a week.

One source with knowledge of the government’s deliberations said: “The latest thinking is that there’s a preference for some sort of Japanese-style model where once you are over 40 you start paying into a central risk pool. They are deadly serious about that.”

Officials are looking into the exact mechanism by which over-40s would pay – whether through a payroll tax or insurance. But social care experts cautioned that any insurance model would have to be compulsory to ensure people paid.

The Conservative MP Damian Green also sees payments by over-40s as the way to resolve the funding question.

However, the Treasury is understood to harbour doubts about moving in that direction. “There are vast differences of opinion within government about this,” the same source said. And it risks angering a generation who will have paid, or still be paying, off their student loans and may have a mortgage and the costs of rearing children to meet.

But a shift to over-40s paying more looks likely to find favour with campaigners. Caroline Abrahams, the charity director at Age UK, said: “Some older people may look askance at the idea of only the over-40s paying to fund a new national care system. However, if that’s what our government is considering embracing here than it may be rather a good deal, since that system offers a level of provision and reassurance that we can only dream of here at the moment.

Introducing a comprehensive and reliable system like that in Germany and Japan would “arguably [be] an appropriate act of national atonement after the catastrophic loss of life we’ve seen in care homes during the pandemic”.

The ex-Liberal Democrat MP Paul Burstow, who was social care minister in the coalition government from 2010-12 and is now chair of the Social Care Institute for Excellence, said: “Introducing an insurance contribution from the over-40s would help put social care on a firm footing for the future. This approach has already been adopted in other countries on a mandatory basis to ensure risk is fairly spread and sufficient funds are raised.” Whatever social care reform is decided upon needs to “avoid the lottery of huge lifetime care bills”, he added.

This month Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, increased the pressure on ministers to solve the social care crisis. In an interview on BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show on 5 July to mark the 72nd anniversary of the service’s creation, he said: “I would hope that by the time we are sitting down this time next year, on the 73rd birthday of the NHS, we have actually, as a country, been able to decisively answer the question [of] how we are going to fund and provide high-quality social care for my parents’ generation.”

His intervention is thought to have irritated ministers.

A Whitehall source said: “As we come out of the Covid-19 pandemic some of the issues that were put on pause during it – like obesity and social care – have come back on stream. The social care problem has been around for ages and there is a renewed focus now on getting it fixed.”

Only 19 families of NHS and social care workers who died after contracting coronavirus have so far been approved for the £60,000 compensation payment from the government.

At least 540 health and social care workers have died in England and Wales during the crisis but, as of 8 July, just 51 claim forms for the taxpayer-funded bereavement scheme had been received. None have been rejected, with 32 still under consideration, according to the figures, provided by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP who obtained the numbers in response to a written parliamentary question, said they showed more needed to be done to increase awareness among bereaved families and ensure all those entitled to claim did so.

“It is concerning that so few families of NHS and care workers who tragically died on the frontline against coronavirus have so far benefitted from this scheme.” she said.

“The government must ensure more is done to promote awareness of this scheme to eligible families.

“No amount of money could ever compensate for any loss of life. But we must honour those who have made the ultimate sacrifice and provide security and comfort for their families.”

The NHS and Social Care Coronavirus Life Assurance (England) Scheme 2020 opened on 20 May. Announcing the scheme on 27 April, the health secretary, Matt Hancock said that 82 NHS workers and 16 social care staff had died during the crisis and he felt “a deep personal sense of duty” to look after their loved ones.

Those figures have risen to 272 and 268 respectively, according to Office for National Statistics data for deaths registered in England and Wales between 9 March and 25 May. A report by Amnesty International earlier this month suggested the total was second only to Russia, where 545 health workers have died.

To be eligible for the English scheme (there is a separate one for Wales):

• Covid-19 must have been a cause of death.
• The individual must have contracted coronavirus in the course of their work.
• They must have been exposed to a “high risk” of contracting the virus during their work, which could not reasonably be avoided.

It was announced amid concerns about whether frontline workers had enough personal protective equipment (PPE) to prevent them from contracting the disease.

Moran, who is standing to be the next leader of the Lib Dems, said on Sunday the compensation scheme should be widened to include the families of other key workers.

“I would also like to see this scheme extended to all key workers who have been on the frontline against this pandemic, including those working in transport,” she said. “All of these essential workers have put their lives at risk to protect others, and they should be reassured that if the worst happens the state will step in to help their loved ones.”

In April, Hancock said the government was looking at other groups of key workers who do not have a life assurance scheme in place.

A DHSC spokesperson said: “Information on the scheme has been shared with NHS and social care employers who are responsible for informing their employees. If employers become aware of a death where there may be eligibility for a claim, they are asked to contact the next of kin.”

Matt Hancock was clear: it was all Apple’s fault.

Standing at the same Downing Street podium where he had promised the government’s contact-tracing app would “save lives”, Mr Hancock now admitted it would not be ready for the lifting of lockdown.

For months, the health secretary had insisted a homemade app was better than one based on the technology developed by Google and Apple.

Yet even as he announced that the government would now use the American firms’ system, Mr Hancock rounded on Apple.

“As it stands, our app won’t work because Apple won’t change their system,” he said, citing a statistic some believe was inaccurate: that the app’s Bluetooth system, which was supposed to detect nearby phones as a way of tracking potentially risky contacts, only detected 4% of iPhones, rendering it effectively useless.

According to several sources familiar with the research, that number only applied to iPhones left until they fall asleep, a subset of a larger figure.

To some onlookers, it was an exercise in deflection. “Like when you’re playing paintball and you throw up a smoke grenade,” as one tech industry source put it.

To others, it was a rare occasion when a senior politician had told the truth about one of the world’s most powerful companies.

Either way, the statement was quickly retracted. According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, a Downing Street official called Apple after the briefing to apologise for the health secretary’s comments.

“Like when you’re playing paintball and you throw up a smoke grenade.” – Tech industry source to Rowland Manthorpe

Apple says it has worked extensively with all branches of the UK government, and in recent weeks, according to a Whitehall insider, Mr Hancock has told officials the firm is “wounded” and is “making nice”.

Such is the turnaround that a source close to the health secretary sung the company’s praises, saying: “We’ve been working incredibly well with Apple.”

Any talk of disagreement was “surface noise”, the source said, adding: “We’ve got a really good collaborative process going on.”

Yet whether the mood is warm or cold, the importance placed on the relationship reaffirms the lesson of England’s attempt to build a contact-tracing app.

Even in the midst of a crisis, the world of technology belongs to Apple and Google. The rest of us – from prime ministers and health secretaries down – are merely living in it.

Even as the project struggled to take shape, the stakes were repeatedly raised, with Mr Hancock making commitments it was not clear he was able to meet.

When the health secretary claimed in mid-May that the app would be “rolled out nationwide by end of next week”, one industry source says, the news of the deadline came as a surprise to the engineers building it.

There is no evidence to suggest this undermined the English response to coronavirus. It did not, for instance, lead to the cessation of manual contact tracing, a move planned from the start of the pandemic.

But people involved with the project, speaking mostly on condition of anonymity, feel as if they were set up for highly public failure, and regret the loss of time and public trust.

To explain why a highly experimental project was given this prominence, Whitehall sources talk about Mr Hancock’s “fanboy” attitude towards technology and what one insider called his “tendency to overpromise and only sometimes deliver”.

They also point back to a time before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, when Mr Hancock launched a new innovation unit for the NHS, NHSX, and appointed former diplomat Matthew Gould as its CEO.

The pair planned to bring a “tech revolution” to the rickety health service. When coronavirus hit, they felt they needed to hasten this transformation.

“A tendency to overpromise and only sometimes deliver.” – Whitehall source to Rowland Manthorpe

“The product idea was that this app would be the beginning of something very significant in how the NHS uses data,” recalls one Whitehall source.

“That’s one of the reasons, I believe, why the decision went towards centralised data. The NHS would have the data and would be able to use it.”

The ambition may have led to the second fundamental flaw identified by numerous people involved with the project. Despite all the energy invested in it, there was never complete clarity about exactly what the app was for.

This dynamic was evident from the outset. At a decisive Department of Health meeting on Friday 6 March, sceptics such as Downing Street adviser Ben Warner argued that the app would not bring enough clear benefits.

A source who attended the meeting said that no single person or piece of evidence undermined this view – including Mr Hancock, who, the source argued, did not drive the creation of the project. The most persuasive argument in the “genuinely scary” situation was simply: “Something is better than nothing.”

From this point the project rapidly picked up pace. The next day, scientists from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute presented a paper showing the epidemiological advantages of “digital contact tracing”.

By Monday, an internal team had been assembled. After Sarah Wilkinson, CEO of NHS Digital, refused to let her organisation take part – “she’s smart,” an NHSX source noted ruefully – outside companies were brought on board.

Two people who worked on the app during this period recall a febrile atmosphere, as a “hodge-podge of suppliers and contractors” tried to move at rapid pace without being entirely sure where they were going.

“There was no one person who was responsible for delivery,” says one source. “There was a big move to put together an app without any clear idea of what this app was trying to do.”

“There was a big move to put together an app without any clear idea of what this app was trying to do.” App developer source to Rowland Manthorpe

In this environment, privacy was not the first consideration. According to two independent sources, plans were developed to use mobile phone location data for tracking – although the government denies this, and the final version of the app did not track users’ locations.

Defenders of NHSX argue that any confusion was an inevitable consequence of working at breakneck speed during a period when the strategy in Downing Street was changing rapidly, and that it settled down after it was taken over by Pivotal, a subsidiary of US tech conglomerate VMWare.

To imagine how it might have turned out if it had come together, it is only necessary to look at the other initiative launched by NHSX at that moment: a vast data store designed to pull in data from across health and social care.

Run by secretive Silicon Valley firm Palantir, the project has been controversial, but officials praise its ability to bring information to the right place at the right time – exactly the kind of result NHSX was designed to deliver.

Mr Hancock and Mr Gould hoped the app would have an even bigger impact.

Instead, they ran into Apple.

NHSX was firmly committed to an app which used low energy Bluetooth to create a record of nearby phones. Such was its centrality that when Public Health England drew up a draft operating model for contact tracing on 23 April, it listed the app alongside swab testing as one of six “pillars”.

Yet already problems were emerging with the strict rules Apple placed on how apps could use Bluetooth.

Restrictions intended to prevent apps from tracking users without consent meant that if the app was taken off the screen or the iPhone fell asleep, then the connection to Bluetooth was cut off, making contact tracing impossible.

Apple was so adamant it barred at least one country’s contact-tracing app from the App Store. A senior foreign government official involved in appeals to the firm said it could be flexible – but only to itself.

The official recalled: “They said, ‘I’m sorry we aren’t able to do anything. In order for us to unlock some of these constraints, we would need to release a major OS update. This is the kind of thing that we only do once a year’.

“And then a couple of weeks later they say, ‘Oh we are going to release a major OS change,’ and the rest is history.”

Working with Google, Apple agreed to loosen its controls to allow public health authorities to do contact tracing (something it says needed to be done universally, rather than piecemeal, to reflect the nature of its global system, and to reduce the risk of the system being used maliciously).

But to get this access, apps had to play by the tech companies’ rules on how the data should be stored.

No central records were allowed, even though they would have made it easier to gather data on the spread of the virus. Instead, apps had to store data in a decentralised way, on individual phones.

National governments raged at this restriction. (“We will remember this when the time comes,” the French digital minister threatened.) But for technical teams, the choice was simple.

“It was obvious immediately,” says Luca Ferrari, founder of Bending Spoons, the company which built the Italian contact-tracing app. “An absolute no-brainer. You should switch.”

Faced with the possibility of an app that Mr Ferrari believed would be “plagued by a number of technical limitations”, the Italian government quickly approved a move to Apple and Google’s framework.

Other countries, including Germany, Japan, Denmark and the Republic of Ireland did the same – partly out of pragmatism, but also because the system was undoubtedly more private.

Yet although NHSX was warned internally and externally about the difficulty – Mr Ferrari says: “We compared notes. We had the same issues” – the UK was committed to a different path, following one fateful decision.

Unlike almost any country in the world, the NHSX app wouldn’t send out alerts based on a positive test, but on reports of symptoms made by users.

Part of the reason was a desire for epidemiological data. But just as important, according to three NHSX advisers, was the fact that the English testing system couldn’t deliver results or data fast enough to make the app work effectively.

This constraint shaped the entire project, because it was impossible to keep an app based on self-reporting secure without collecting data on how it was used.

Simply put, people might not tell the truth – and to protect against this possibility, a centralised app was needed.

To make the app work, the developers would have to achieve the extraordinarily difficult task of circumventing Apple’s restrictions. And the politicians would have to decide how far they were willing to go to challenge the tech companies’ control of the platforms they owned and operated.

“That’s the key question,” says Professor Lillian Edwards, a member of the app’s Ethics Advisory Board, who watched with bemusement as the project lost momentum.

As soon as Google and Apple released their technology in mid-May, NHSX awarded a £4m contract to Swiss company Zulke to look into it. But for more than a month, there was no change.

The delay continued even after NHSX had decided to stop relying on self-reporting to trigger the app’s alerts.

On Thursday 4 June, the Ethics Advisory Board was told that “alerts will be based on contacts with cases confirmed by testing, rather than based on self-reported symptoms”. (A government spokesperson said the change was to align the app with the manual tracing programme.)

The chief rationale for a centralised system had been removed – and still no switch was forthcoming.

While the project drifted, other governments were moving forward. Northern Ireland’s health minister rejected the English app, citing “difficulties” and “uncertainties” in its development, and opted instead for Google and Apple’s system.

Currently being developed by local firm NearForm, the region’s app is expected to be released by the end of July.

To Professor Edwards, one of the problems was the information coming back from the pilot on the Isle of Wight.

Launched with some ceremony on 5 May – Mr Hancock declared: “Where the Isle of Wight leads, Britain follows” – it did not seem designed to answer specific questions about its functionality.

“My impression was that it was primarily intended to be able to say what percent of the population there had downloaded the app,” says Professor Edwards. “That was the number one PR policy goal.”

Even the number of downloads was hard to fix. On 14 May, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps declared that 72,300 people, “over half the residents of the Isle of Wight”, had installed the app. A few days later, Downing Street put the total at “roughly 60,000”.

The difficulty, according to a Whitehall source, was that there was no way to verify whether people using Isle of Wight postcodes to get access to the app were actually there in person, so anyone downloading it for research was accidentally added to the total. (The final number was recently confirmed as 56,000, a figure the government says it tracked accurately.)

Other kinds of information also proved hard to acquire. According to an adviser to the project, an attempt to assess the impact of the app on different ethnic groups was delayed after a survey showed the island wasn’t diverse enough to provide useful responses.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “The NHS COVID-19 app has undergone some of the most rigorous testing in the world”.

But the final test which showed that the app was only detecting 4% of iPhones had to be conducted away from the island, an NHSX source said, because it wasn’t set up to answer the most basic question of all: whether it actually worked.

“How would you know if two phones were meant to ping [on the Isle of Wight]?” the source said. “How would you know they had been close? Or not?”

It was the results of this test which killed the project, once they reached the new head of NHS Test and Trace, former TalkTalk CEO Baroness Dido Harding.

Since arriving in May, she had downgraded the app to the status of “cherry on the cake” and brought in a former Apple executive to run it, establishing a reputation as “someone everyone is scared of”, as one NHSX source put it.

Now, on 18 July, she made a decisive intervention, seizing on the information as evidence that the app wasn’t working. Mr Hancock made the announcement at the daily press briefing, but NHSX sources say the key move came from Baroness Harding.

The attempt to build a homegrown app was over. From now on, the NHS was committed to Google and Apple.

Such was the speed of the intervention that staff at NHSX were only told on the morning of the announcement. A senior official in a foreign government said they had been assured “not 24 hours” earlier that the existing app would continue to be used.

Yet while the decision brought expectations down to a more manageable level, more than one senior adviser to the project questioned whether it had corrected the app’s other fundamental flaw. To them, it still didn’t seem clear what it was for.

The issue was the temperamental technology at the heart of the app, Bluetooth.

Experiments on the Isle of Wight and in the anechoic chamber inside the National Cyber Security Centre produced eyebrow-raising results.

Some Android phones reported a constant signal strength or spat out numbers at random. Signals changed because of how a phone sat in the hand.

The problem was how to use this chronically unreliable data to decide whether a contact was risky. Inside NHSX, a team led by Mark Briers, Programme Director at The Alan Turing Institute, investigated the issue. A senior official described the work as “spectacular”, saying it went some way to allowing NHSX to tell who should be warned when a case was identified.

But there was a catch. NHSX was only able to do this work because it wasn’t using Apple and Google’s system.

Their technology gave public health authorities the ability to use smartphones’ systems, but it did not provide access to raw Bluetooth data. Rather, information was presented as crude estimates, which could not be interrogated or fine-tuned.

“Google and Apple have given governments an abacus in an era of machine learning,” wrote Tom Loosemore, one of the founders of the Government Digital Service, in an article shared within Downing Street and the Department of Health.

Not only was Google and Apple’s system frustratingly opaque, it didn’t take in data at regular intervals to compensate for Bluetooth’s quirks. Senior advisers to NHSX weren’t convinced it worked.

Two pointed to research by Trinity College Dublin, which concluded that the reflection of radio waves from metal made getting reliable information on a bus “hard or perhaps even impossible”.

Similar tests in supermarkets showed that two people walking at the opposite ends of aisles would appear to be almost next to each other. (Google and Apple did not respond to a request for comment on this specific problem, but engineers at both companies stressed that while Bluetooth was not ideal for measuring distance, it could be a useful tool, and was improving rapidly.)

The choice came down to priorities. As one adviser put it, Apple and Google’s app would detect everyone, but it wouldn’t detect the most risky people very well. With the NHSX app, the reverse was true.

The question for the government was who they wanted to identify. With its answer, it seemed determined to have its cake and eat it.

The spokesperson added: “Our aim is that it will help users engage with every aspect of the existing NHS Test and Trace service, which is successfully up and running and has already helped stop more than 100,000 people from unknowingly spreading the virus.”

Yet, with no timeline set for its arrival, it is still unclear whether England will ever have a contact-tracing app.

The government’s hope, according to a senior official, is that Google and Apple will integrate NHSX’s work on Bluetooth into their framework. But the official had to admit they didn’t know if this would happen, or even the timeline for a decision.

On this, and many other questions, control now rests with Google and Apple.

The two firms maintain that they are only working to stop the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy, but they have shown where power truly lies in the world of technology. Did they outmanoeuvre governments around the world?

“I wouldn’t say they outmanoeuvred them during this crisis,” says Michael Veale, a lecturer in digital rights and regulation at University College London. “In practice the outmanoeuvring happened years ago, when the platforms created and consolidated their walled gardens without effective regulation or oversight.”

“There has been so little long-term thinking on platform power that any engagement with the firms is on their terms, short-term and ad hoc.”

To see that dynamic in action, it is worth thinking back to early April, when Google and Apple announced that they were getting into contact tracing, beginning a long-term rollout of the technology. The UK government had already started its work. This could have been a moment for it to take the lead.

But in Westminster, other considerations came to the fore. On 10 April, Boris Johnson had just been moved from intensive care, after a case of coronavirus had brought him close to death. The health secretary and the cabinet secretary had also been ill. The government was, one Whitehall source recalls, “desperate” for good news – and the app seemed to be just that.

“These were very dark moments,” the source recalled. “The prime minister was ill. Matt Hancock had been ill himself. Thousands of people were dying every day. You had a government, a machine, that was terribly eager for good news.”

“It was a lot like 1940, the first few months,” the source reflected. “It was a bit like the Norway campaign. Go off and do something that’ll be a big success – and it turns out to be a debacle.”

And even if you can get over that hurdle, you’re still nowhere near home free, because before you’re given permission, people in hi-vis jackets will have to visit the site to make sure that no bats will be affected. They will spend the night in your garden, and then they will announce that they have definitely seen a pipistrelle, and that it will have to be rehoused before work can begin.

So how do you rehouse a bat? Well, in theory, the only way is to offer it superior accommodation, which means you must encourage it to move into your rich neighbour’s much larger house. Unfortunately, this is impossible because bats have no powers of reason, so what you must do is shoot it* and then tell the council man that, much to your surprise, it just upped sticks one day and left.

However, as it is extremely difficult to shoot a bat, many people decide instead to join the freemasons. If you do this, there will be no awkward questions about bats, or newts, and any pesky objections from your Daily Mail-reading neighbours will be put in the bin.

Some people think that, to win over a planner, you must take him to your box at Wembley or educate his children, but you really don’t. You simply shake his hand, being careful to press down hard with your thumb on his index-finger knuckle, and immediately he will assume you’re the Duke of Kent and allow you to build the purple guitar-shaped orangery you’ve always dreamt about. Oh, and 16 executive homes in your paddock.

But all that’s due to change, thanks to the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, who’s obviously been to a fundraising ball of some sort and decided, while sitting next to a property developer, that Britain would get back on its feet quicker if the planners were a bit more supine.

Naturally, people are now running around, waving their arms in the air and screaming blue murder, claiming McDonald’s will soon be opening a drive-through in Bibury and KFC will be allowed to build a takeaway joint in two new storeys on the top of York Minster.

However, the thing that seems to have caused the most froth and spittle is the proposal to let people convert town-centre shops into residential accommodation. “People can’t be expected to live in houses where all the windows face the same way” scream the nation’s architects. But I’m not sure about that. Iron Man lived in a house built into a cliff, and that was amazing. And what about Petra? All the windows face the same way there.

Architects have converted churches into houses and won awards for it. They’ve also converted barns, pig sties, sewage plants, factories, stables and even caves. I know one architect who lives in a yurt, and that has no windows at all. So why the sudden beef about converting a branch of WH Smiths?

Town centres have been dying for some time, and the coronavirus has accelerated that process. When I moved to Chipping Norton, 25 years ago, there were little shops selling hardware, hi-fi kit, car accessories and shoes. There was even a charming department store, and now all of them have gone.

Every day, the planners are giving permission for more and more houses to be built in the surrounding area, seemingly without noticing they’re creating a doughnut. A ring of smart new Barratt boxes all gathered round a big empty hole in the middle.

I don’t doubt for a minute that your town is exactly the same, so it makes sense to turn some of those empty shops into houses. That would bring in people, and when you have people, restaurants and bars will follow, along with all the little boutiques and market stalls that sell stuff you can’t buy at an out-of-town superstore or online.

You therefore end up with a fun place full of families rather than a dusty and vandalised hellhole full of pizza boxes, vomit and charity shops selling nothing but books by Richard Hammond about how he didn’t die in a car accident.

And it’s not just town planning that needs a shake-up. According to the Daily Mail, I’m in a spot of bother with my local planners at the moment because they don’t like the juniper-green steel roof on my new farm shop.

Now, at this point you’re probably expecting me to describe in some detail the size of the traffic cone I’m going to insert into the planning officer responsible for this objection, but I’m not, because I’ve dealt with the planners round these parts for many years and they’re all very sensible. The rules they have to implement, however? That’s a different story.

If I filled my new barn with farming equipment, it’d be an agricultural building, and there’s nothing really the council could do about it. If, however, I fill it with local produce and employ local women to sell it to local customers, the council can do something, and it has.

It’s obviously nuts. But, that said, we can’t have a planning free-for-all. We do need some rules, because, unfortunately, in this country not everyone has very good taste.

*You could eat it, of course, but I really wouldn’t recommend that.

Being British has been a discomforting experience for the past six months. A nation that had prided itself on the strength and resilience of its healthcare system has been laid low by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has claimed nearly 50,000 lives in the UK. Most other western nations have suffered fewer deaths and endured comparatively little national trauma. Not surprisingly, the UK government’s handling of the crisis has been heavily criticised, mostly for its tardiness and incompetence. Britain was too late in going into lockdown and it abandoned its ability to test for the coronavirus when it should have been ramping up capacity. The prime minister has blustered and vacillated over key policies from the wearing of masks to the timing of the easing of lockdown restrictions.

Given this sad background, it has been startling to note recent headlines and comments made across the world about the country’s Covid-19 response. “The Brits are on course to save the world,” claimed the US economist Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg Opinion, while the American journal Science was at pains to quote leading international scientists who have heaped praise on our researchers’ anti-Covid work. “UK megatrial outshines other drug studies,” ran one of its headlines.

The focus of all this attention is the Recovery trial programme set up by Oxford University scientists Martin Landray and Peter Horby. It has taken advantage of the vast numbers of stricken Covid-19 patients who have flooded Britain’s hospital wards in order to carry out careful, randomised trials that have revealed the efficacy of treatments provided by doctors. Thanks to this work, a cheap steroid drug called dexamethasone has been shown to reduce deaths by a third in seriously stricken patients and is now used across the world as standard care for seriously ill patients. At the same time, the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, heavily promoted by Donald Trump and others, was revealed to have no effect as a treatment of Covid-19. It has now been dropped from clinical use for Covid-19 patients. These successes contrast with the failures of other countries, in particular the US, to assess carefully what treatments will actually improve the health – or save the lives – of patients.

Landray and Horby deserve considerable credit for their pioneering efforts. Their Recovery trial programme was set up in only a few days as hospitals prepared themselves for the waves of seriously sick patients that would soon swamp their wards. Normally, it takes months to organise a large randomised drug trial. But, as both scientists have acknowledged, there have been many other individuals and organisations who deserve acclaim for their involvement in Recovery. For a start, there are the 3,000 doctors and nurses, often sleep-deprived, stressed and anxious, who helped collect precious data in the grim setting of their hospital’s intensive care units while also struggling to save patients’ lives. Around 12,000 individuals with serious Covid-19 infections were recruited to Recovery; many of them have died. Their involvement underlines the tragic impact of Covid-19 and the importance of Recovery in pinpointing drugs that should help to reduce future loss of life.

Britain had one other advantage, of course. It possesses the centralised National Health Service. Many other nations have health services that are fragmented and so cannot launch sufficiently large-scale trials. By contrast, Britain was able to combine data from hospitals that have ranged from the Western Isles to Truro and from Derry to King’s Lynn and so tease out data that will continue to pinpoint life-saving treatments while highlighting those that are worthless. In addition, the National Institute for Health Research, created in 2006 and which provided Landray and Horby with their programme’s £2m funding, has played a critically important role in this affair. If nothing else, Recovery has demonstrated starkly the importance of possessing a strong, well-funded, national programme for treating patients and for assessing their needs on a sound scientific basis.

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While privately owned chains such as PureGym, David Lloyd and Virgin Active are eager to proceed with opening plans, the charitable trusts behind the country’s 2,116 council-owned sites, are being circumspect as coronavirus restrictions tip their finances into the red.

Jane Parish, the chief executive of Sencio, which runs three leisure centres and a golf course in Kent, said the future of its facilities was hanging in the balance after it ran out of cash during the quarantine period.

“We’ve been losing £100,000 a week of income but have still been incurring costs maintaining our buildings,” she said. “We’ve got no reserves left whatsoever.”

Parish said the need to limit visitor numbers meant Sencio would be making a loss when it opens its centres on 3 August.

Sencio has 11,500 members but its gyms and pools are popular with over-70s, some of whom were reluctant to return yet. It will take until early 2021 for income to reach even two-thirds of pre-pandemic levels, she predicts and is applying for a £700,000 emergency loan to tide it over.

“We applied for a business interruption loan with our bank but didn’t get it because they wanted security, which our council wouldn’t give us,” said Parish. “I employ 343 staff. That’s a lot of staff and livelihoods could be in jeopardy.”

She said “we won’t survive” if the loan request was later declined.

The UK has about 7,200 gyms and leisure centres, with approximately two-thirds run privately and the rest by councils or operators on their behalf.

Before the pandemic 10.4 million people had memberships but some of the large chains have reported losing up to a fifth of their clientele as Britons reined in spending during lockdown.

After a frustrating delay – gyms had hoped to reopen alongside England’s pubs and hotels – popular chains such as PureGym, David Lloyd and Virgin Active are champing at the bit despite the financial implications of half empty gyms, smaller exercise classes and expensive cleaning regimes. A date is yet to be set for gyms, leisure centres and swimming pools in Scotland and Wales to open, while facilities in Northern Ireland were allowed to open on 10 July.

The sports minister, Nigel Huddleston, said: “Given the huge benefits exercise has for physical and mental health, I know people across the country can’t wait to get back to the gym.

“But it’s vital that users feel safe. That’s why we have worked hard with the sector to make sure they have the guidance they need to put strict safety measures in place.”

Glenn Earlam, the chief executive of the David Lloyd chain, said he was hopeful gym usage would return to normal by the end of the year. The firm has lost about 10% of its 600,000 members mainly because it has been unable to offset the usual rate of attrition.

“Fitness is a successful growth business but this has been an enormous shock,” Earlam said. “We have survived four months of closure and we will be fine, providing people come back come back in normal numbers, even if it takes us a while to build back the volume we have lost.”

The shift to working from home is also creating opportunities for the upmarket chain, with its spacious centres and free wifi. Several companies have inquired about corporate memberships whereby staff could base themselves at a David Lloyd club.

However, there is a concern that nearly half of Britain’s public leisure centres will not be able to stay the course, meaning even those that open their doors in the coming days could be forced to close again.

UK Active and Community Leisure UK, the industry trade bodies, estimate 1,300 of the 2,727 leisure centres funded by local authorities and 20% of the UK’s swimming pools could go under by Christmas unless the government steps in to help.

“We have acute cashflow issues and are totally and utterly dependent on support from a council facing its own challenges,” said Chris Rushton, the chief executive of Active Tameside, which runs eight leisure centres in Greater Manchester. “We will open on a vastly restricted capacity and lose money as the furlough scheme winds down.”

Rushton added: “Swathes of our sector are at risk. Not everything will reopen, and not everything that opens will be the same as it was previously. We are a sector that is delivering untold health and social impact and that is what is in danger here.”

Since 2015 more than 60,000 flats have been created through permitted development in England, with almost 90% coming from office conversions, representing a loss of tens of thousands of affordable homes, according to Shelter. “We were astounded,” says Robin White of the housing charity, in response to the new legislation. “This is a far cry from the prime minister’s promise to Build Back Better. And a far cry from the good quality, affordable social homes that this country so desperately needs.” Even the government’s own Building Better, Building Beautiful commission concluded that permitted development had inadvertently created “future slums”.

The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Alan Jones, describes the extensions of the policy as “disgraceful”, leading to more homes with rooms that will be “smaller than in budget hotels”. “There is no evidence that the planning system is to blame for the shortage of housing,” he says, “and plenty to suggest that leaving local communities powerless in the face of developers seeking short-term returns will lead to poor results.”

In what represents the most drastic change to permitted development rights since the planning system was introduced after the second world war, the legislation opens the door for a new generation of rabbit-hutch homes to proliferate unchecked. If an office or industrial building built before 1990 has been vacant for six months, it may now be demolished and replaced with a house or apartment block, without any planning scrutiny. Another amendment allows an additional two residential storeys to be added on top of existing buildings, while a third change combines everything from shops and restaurants, to gyms, health facilities, nurseries, offices and light industrial buildings into a single use class. As Rob McNicol, principal strategic planer at the Greater London Authority, tweeted: “This matters because you will now no longer need planning permission to change between these uses. The changes unpick a decades-long approach to planning for town centre uses. It is an untested nationwide experiment in laissez-faire town centre management.”

The Greater Exeter Strategic Plan will provide the overall strategy and level of housing and employment land required across Exeter, East Devon, Mid Devon and Teignbridge in the period to 2040.