UK coronavirus live: teachers and children will be safe at school, says Michael Gove

• Michael Gove has told local authorities refusing to reopen their schools on 1 June to “look to their responsibilities”, saying: “If you really care about children, you’ll want them in schools.” Appearing on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show, the Cabinet Office minister said: “We are confident that children and teachers will be safe.”

• Gove also said the government had now recruited 17,000 contact tracers for its coronavirus test, track and trace programme – bringing it close to its target. Health secretary Matt Hancock said on 23 April that the government wanted to recruit 18,000 contact tracers by mid-May. But speaking on Friday, northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis said only 1,500 had been recruited.

• The latest Opinium poll for the Observer shows that approval for the government over its handling of the pandemic has plummeted by nine points in the last week. Whereas net approval of its performance – the figure reached when the percentage who disapprove is subtracted from percentage who approve – stood at +42% on 26 March, it has now fallen to -3%.

• Overall data from the few countries that have reopened schools has been “very reassuring” but governments need to consider what checks are needed to avoid a spread of Covid-19, the chief scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said. Dr Soumya Swaminathan said she believes that “society has to restart” but that there will be a new normal.

• Boris Johnson has acknowledged “frustration” over the new lockdown rules, which have been criticised for being complicated and unclear, and admitted that there may never be a vaccine for coronavirus. Writing in the Mail on Sunday, the prime minister announced a £93m investment to open the new Vaccine Manufacturing And Innovation Centre, 12 months ahead of schedule. He said:
  

  
  

  There remains a very long way to go, and I must be frank that a vaccine might not come to fruition. But we are leading the global effort.

Dr Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO), spoke to the BBC’s Andrew Marr show earlier. The PA news agency has her comments.

Asked about the reopening of schools, and evidence from countries that have done so, Dr Swaminathan said:

Overall, the data has been very reassuring, though of course it’s only a few countries that have done that. The guidance that has been put out by WHO clearly lays out the criteria you would use when you consider whether to reopen a school or not…

It’s really important that all the stakeholders, that is the teachers, the children themselves and the parents or caregivers, have had a chance to have a dialogue and ask questions, and be informed of what is being done to minimise the risks and what they need to do.

Dr Swaminathan said evidence from countries where schools have remained open suggests this has not led to large outbreaks of Covid-19.

What we have seen in countries where schools have remained open is that there have not been big outbreaks in schools, and where there have been it’s been associated with events – where a lot of people gather, not in regular classrooms, and it’s often been associated with an adult whose had the infection and has spread it.

The chief executive of Heathrow Airport John Holland-Kaye has warned the government that quarantine measures should not extend beyond “a relatively short amount of time” to save the economy.

The government announced plans last Sunday for a two-week quarantine for travellers arriving in the UK from abroad, though the exact details haven’t yet been announced.

Holland-Kaye told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme that Heathrow’s passenger numbers had dropped by 97% – from an average of 250,000 passengers a day to between 5,000 and 6,000. He said most of these passengers were either repatriating to the UK or going home to other countries.

The quarantine cannot be in place for more than a relatively short amount of time if we are going to get the economy moving again. There needs to be a plan for what comes next.

This is where we are urging the Government to have a common international standard, working with other countries so that traffic can start to flow in a normal way between low risk countries.

Speaking to the same programme, Carolyn Fairbairn, director general of the CBI, said she’d heard from businesses in aerospace and manufacturing who were very worried about the government’s quarantine plans. “We would like to see an international standard,” she said. “At the moment you’ve got different countries doing different things and that is very bad for global trade.”

Gove also defended the government’s plans to begin reopening primary schools in England from next month. He told Sky News:

Other countries have succeeded in ensuring children can return to school safely. The nature of what happens in the classroom has changed.

Instead of children working around the table they are sitting at desks separate from each other and, as a result, they are able to learn, they are able to benefit from being in school.

Gove told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show that the government were confident that teachers and students would be safe if they returned to school.

He said that pupils may have to sit at separate desks, that class sizes should be capped at 15 and arrival times should be staggered.

Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove has told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme that the government has now recruited 17,000 contact tracers for its coronavirus test, track and trace programme – bringing it close to its target.

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, said on 23 April that the government wanted to recruit 18,000 contact tracers by mid-May. But speaking on Friday, northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis said only 1,500 had been recruited. The prime minister’s spokesperson said later that day that Lewis did not have the most up-to-date figures.

“It is now the case that more than 17,000 people have been recruited for contact tracing, so we are on course to meet that target,” said Gove on Sunday morning.

“I have to praise the work of the health secretary Matt Hancock. In the past people have seen Matt and the government set ambitious targets and said on testing ‘that won’t be met’ – Matt met that target,” Gove said of the 100,000-a-day testing target.

He said the test, track and trace programme – seen as key to further lifting of lockdown restrictions – would be up and running by the end of May.

A story in today’s Mail on Sunday reports that the Labour leader Keir Starmer owns land “worth up to £10m”. The piece of land in question is a field behind his parents house in Surrey, which he bought in 1996. It currently doesn’t have planning permission, but – if it did – it could be worth a lot of money, the paper reports. Starmer has no plans to sell the land.

Starmer’s response to the story has been getting as much attention as the story itself. A spokesperson for the Labour leader told the paper:

Keir purchased the field for his late disabled mother. The field was used to house donkeys that Keir’s parents rescued and cared for. After his mother lost the ability to walk, the field allowed her to still watch the donkeys from her home.

The field is not for sale and no one, developer or otherwise, has been shown around it.

Speaking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner has said that if the test, track and trace strategy were in place before reopening schools, that would reassure parents and teachers – a point also made by Rachel Reeves earlier this morning. She repeated calls for the government to publish the scientific advice that informed their decision to send some pupils back to school as early as 1 June. Labour wants as many pupils as possible to go back to school as quickly as possible, she said.

The Sun on Sunday reports today that Boris Johnson told a virtual meeting of backbench Tory MPs that he wanted the country back to “close to normality again before the end of July”.

The paper’s political editor, David Wooding, writes that the prime minister told a video call with 100 of his MPs that full Commons sittings would resume on 2 June.

He quotes an MP as saying:

Boris told us he is determined that the country should be as close to normality again before the end of July.

But he was clear that is all depends on the country meeting the conditions that have been set for tackling the virus.

Most importantly that means bringing down the infection rate – and that can only be achieved if the continues to obey the rules on social distancing to help stop it spreading.

Shadow Cabinet Office minister Rachel Reeves has been speaking to Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme. She said the reopening of schools was a “difficult balancing act” as social distancing, particularly for young children, is “really, really tough” along with the wearing of face masks.

She said teachers and parents would be less anxious about the return to school if there was a test, trace and isolate strategy in place.

Government need to put in place some of the measures to improve confidence and that includes the test, trace and isolate strategy. The government abandoned that back in the middle of March, that was a mistake because the countries that have most successfully tackled the virus have had extensive systems of test, trace and isolate and the government now says they want to bring that back by mid-May … the anxiety that teachers and parents face, I think would be a lot less if we had that test, trace and isolate strategy in place.

Her comments come following an announcement by education secretary Gavin Williamson at yesterday’s Downing Street press conference that schoolchildren and their families would be tested for coronavirus if they develop symptoms.

Teaching unions have pushed back against government proposals for some pupils to return to school as soon as 1 June. The British Medical Association, the UK’s largest doctors’ union – also said in a letter to the National Education Union on Friday that the number of coronavirus infections remained too high to allow them to run safely.

Damian Hinds, former Conservative education secretary, told BBC Breakfast this morning that it was “totally understandable” that people had concerns about their children returning to school and that he would expect teaching unions to be thinking about their members, adding this is “absolutely right”.

He added that he thinks “the time is right now” for pupils to begin to return, saying “there is a lot scientific advice and analysis gone into this”.

Here are today’s front pages, tweeted by the BBC’s Neil Henderson.

More from the Observer – The latest Opinium poll for the paper shows that approval for the government over its handling of the pandemic has plummeted by nine points in the last week.

Whereas net approval of its performance – the figure reached when the percentage who disapprove is subtracted from percentage who approve – stood at +42% on 26 March, it has now fallen to -3%.

For the first time since Opinium began tracking views on the pandemic in March, more people disapprove of the government’s handling than approve. Only 44% think the new “stay alert” message is clear. Some 56% say they are not clear who they can meet outside their household.

Andy Burnham has written in the Observer that no one thought to tell the leaders of the biggest towns and cities outside London in advance of the prime minister’s decision to encourage people to go back to work last Monday.

In Greater Manchester, we had no real notice of the measures. On the eve of a new working week, the PM was on TV ‘actively encouraging’ a return to work. Even though that would clearly put more cars on roads and people on trams, no one in government thought it important to tell the cities who’d have to cope with that.

Far from a planned, safety-led approach, this looked like another exercise in Cummings chaos theory.

But it wasn’t just the lack of notice that was the problem. The surprisingly permissive package might well be right for the southeast, given the fall in cases there. But my gut feeling told me it was too soon for the north. Certainly, the abrupt dropping of the clear “stay at home” message felt premature.

You can read the full piece here and the Observer’s news story here.

I’ll be bringing you the highlights from this morning’s political shows,

Sophy Ridge on Sunday (today hosted by Niall Paterson) is on Sky News at 8.30am. Guests will include the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Michael Gove, and Rachel Reeves, his Labour opposite number.

Liam Fox, former international trade secretary will make an appearance, as will Heathrow Airport chief executive John Holland-Kaye and CBI director general Carolyn Fairbairn.

Gove will also be on the Andrew Marr show on BBC 1, which starts at 9am. Other guests include Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, WHO Chief Scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan and Office for Budget Responsibility chair Robert Chote.