UK coronavirus live: Two-metre rule could be relaxed as lockdown eased, minister suggests

Turning away from coronavirus for a moment, there is big news in Labourworld. Jennie Formby has announced that she standing down as general secretary. In a statement she said:

When I applied for the role of general secretary in 2018 it was because I wanted to support Jeremy Corbyn, who inspired so many people to get involved in politics with his message of hope, equality and peace

It has been a huge privilege to be general secretary of the largest political party in Europe for the last two years, but now we have a new leadership team it is the right time to step down. I would like to thank Jeremy, our members and my staff colleagues who have given me so much support during what has been a very challenging period, in particular when I was suffering from ill health.

This is important because the general secretary runs Labour HQ and Formby’s resignation means that Sir Keir Starmer can now install one of his own allies in the post. Formby, who worked for Unite before becoming general secretary in 2018, was close to Jeremy Corbyn and his faction in the party. In the Conservative party a new leader is free to install his or her acolytes in top jobs at party HQ but in the Labour party the general secretary is more independent, and harder to move if he or she has the backing of the national executive committee. It took Corbyn more than two years to instal a general secretary viewed as a loyalist.

Paying tribute to Formby, Starmer said:

I would like to thank Jennie for her service, and for the personal and professional efforts she has made in advancing the cause she has fought all her life for.

Jennie has led our party’s organisation with commitment and energy through a period of political upheaval, including a snap general election last year. I wish her the very best for the future.

Labour’s NEC will meet soon to decide the timetable for electing a new general secretary.

Asda has offered priority delivery slots to thousands of care homes for the next six months and donated 250,000 face masks to protect workers and residents, the supermarket said.

Bosses said 3,500 care homes across the country will be able to book the slots.

It follows similar moves by other supermarkets to offer deliveries to those finding it hardest to get to stores during the coronavirus lockdown.

The Asda chief executive, Roger Burnley, said: “The impact of Covid on our care system has been the subject of numerous news reports in recent days, and the challenges facing our nation’s care homes and the staff who are working so hard to protect some of our most vulnerable people have been heartbreaking to see.

“Giving priority access to these amazing care homes is, I believe, the right thing for us to do – and I am proud that, having built the capacity of our online delivery service in recent weeks from 450,000 slots to 700,000 weekly slots, we are able to do this for our care homes.”

The medical-grade masks will be delivered later this month, he added.

The “alternative Sage [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies]” meeting (see 9.29am) organised by Sir David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, is just getting going now. There is a live feed here.

The Office for National Statistics has published a report this morning on well-being (or happiness, to put it crudely, although the ONS uses various different measures to assess this). As you would expect, coronavirus has led to an increase in the overall level of misery.

Here are the main points.

• Almost half (49.6%) of people in Great Britain reported “high” levels of anxiety between 20 and 30 March. (The lockdown was announced on 23 March.) That is more than double the level at the end of 2019 (21%). This chart makes the same point in another way. It shows how the average level of anxiety in that 10-day period was 5.18 out of 10, compared to a long-term average of about 3.

• Over the same 10-day period 20.7% of people reported low levels of life satisfaction. That is more than double the figure for the final quarter of 2019, when just 8.4% of people said they felt like this. A low level of life satisfaction means a score of 0 to 4, when people are asked to give their satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10.

Here is the full standards committee report into Conor Burns.

An investigation was launched after a complaint was made to the parliamentary commissioner for standards saying that Burns had written a letter on Commons notepaper in an attempt to help his father recover money that was allegedly owed to him following a loan. In the letter to the complainant, who is not named in the report, Burns also suggested that he might raise the case in the Commons chamber using parliamentary privilege if his father did not get the money he felt was owed to him.

In his conclusion the standards committee said:

Like the [parliamentary commissioner for standards], we are persuaded by the evidence that Mr Burns used his parliamentary position in an attempt to intimidate a member of the public into doing as Mr Burns wished, in a dispute relating to purely private family interests which had no connection with Mr Burns’ parliamentary duties. Mr Burns persisted in making veiled threats to use parliamentary privilege to further his family’s interests even during the course of the commissioner’s investigation. He also misleadingly implied that his conduct had the support of the house authorities.

Parliamentary privilege, particularly the privilege of freedom of speech, is precious to our democracy. The right of members of parliament to speak in the chamber without fear or favour is essential to parliament’s ability to scrutinise the executive and to tackle social abuses, particularly if the latter are committed by the rich and powerful who might use the threat of defamation proceedings to deter legitimate criticism. Precisely because parliamentary privilege is so important, it is essential to maintaining public respect for parliament that the protection afforded by privilege should not be abused by a member in the pursuit of their purely private and personal interests. We, like the commissioner, conclude that Mr Burns was guilty of abusing his privileged status in an attempt to intimidate a member of the public.

Burns told the committee that he accepted he should not have written the letter he did on Commons notepaper, but that he was under a “huge amount of personal stress” at the time. He said he was sorry for what he had done.

Downing Street has announced that Conor Burns has resigned as an international trade minister. A No 10 spokesman said:

Conor Burns has resigned as minister of state for international trade following a report from the parliamentary commissioner for standards. A replacement will be announced in due course.

On the basis of a report from the parliamentary commissioner, the Commons standards committee said that Burns should receive a seven-day suspension from the House of Commons for abusing his position as an MP in order to further his private family interests.

Burns became an MP in 2010 but only became a minister last summer, when Boris Johnson became PM. His promotion was seen as a reward for his having been one of Johnson’s most loyal backbench supporters.

I will post more from the standards committee report shortly.

Last week Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, announced that small firms could apply for “bounce back” loans worth up to £50,000. These loans are meant to be simpler to obtain than some of the other coronavirus loans available, and they are 100% backed by the government (not 80% backed, liked the others, which means banks should have no qualms about lending).

The scheme is now open. Here is the Treasury’s news release, and firms can apply here.

The Times has more details about plans for that contact tracing app – about which more is expected to be announced by the health secretary at this evening’s press conference.

The paper reports that researchers at Oxford University have set up a model in computer code, which simulates a city of 1 million people – all behaving as we do in normal times, using public transport, seeing friends and family – in order to track how the app would work.

Early tests have been a success and the next stage is to roll the app out to residents on the Isle of Wight, where eight out of 10 people with smartphones need to download it in order for the trial to be effective. If this stage of the trial is a success it will be introduced across the rest of the country in weeks.

The app uses bluetooth to record everybody you come in close contact with. The data it gathers will stay on your phone until you notify the app that you have symptoms, at which point it will be uploaded to a central server and people who need to self-isolate will be alerted.

At least 15,000 staff will be needed to arrange testing for those with symptoms. In a separate report, the Times says that this work will be outsourced to private call centre operators including Serco. Staff will be given about a day of training before starting work.

The Times reports that there is disagreement in government about how much data the app should gather. The app used in South Korea, for example, records real time location data, so that authorities can see where there are clusters of infections. There are no plans for the UK app to do this. The paper says:

[The] essential dilemma is this: The more intrusive the app is – the more information it gathers and relays to a central database – the more useful it will be in tracking localised outbreaks and guiding the ‘human’ tracing work.

Yet at the same time the more intrusive it is the less people are likely to download it and unless it has significant take up it is more of a gimmick than a genuinely useful tool.

Demonstrators have blocked access to building sites for the HS2 high-speed railway in London and Warwickshire, in protest at construction work continuing amid the coronavirus crisis, PA Media reports. The group, who call themselves HS2 Rebellion, claim the work is non-essential and that, by failing to sop during the lockdown, it is putting the lives of workers and their families at risk. They say that health workers remain without personal protective equipment (PPE) and that money used for construction projects should be channelled to such medical supplies instead.

Here is a tweet from HS2 Rebellion explaining their case.

In an interview on the Today programme this morning Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, a medical research charity, and a member of Sage, the government’s scientific advisory group for emergencies, said that there was “nothing magical” about the two-metre rule and that other ways of minimising contact might be as effective . He told the programme:

It’s based on old data about how far when we cough and we sneeze that the droplets and the aerosols that may come from that spread. There’s nothing magical about two metres. Perhaps more importantly is the time you spend in contact with somebody else. Not just the distance but also the time.

(As this BBC analysis by David Shukman explains, some of this “old data” goes back to the 1930s.)

In his interview Farrar also said that, when the lockdown eased, he would not approve of separate rules applying to the over-70s just on the basis of their age. He said:

I think it’s very difficult to have different rules for different age groups. I think isolating certain groups and saying you’re different to the rest of society is a very, very difficult message to give and I personally would not be in favour of that.