The health secretary told the BBC's Andrew Marr that the next stage of opening England up from lockdown would still go ahead this week despite concerns about the India variant.
'I'm confident that we can take the step tomorrow, but we should all be careful about how we take that step,' Hancock said.
He added that the government would announce a decision on whether to end all lockdown measures – currently planned for 21 June – on 14 June
Continue reading...Move to include local authorities in test and trace could allow politicians to pass blame in a Covid second wave
The saga of the attempts to set up an English test-and-trace system is perhaps the central story of the government’s Covid-19 failure.
At the heart of the tale is a prime minister who promised NHS test and trace would be a “world beating” operation. Next to him sits Matt Hancock, the health secretary whose record is now indelibly associated with the smartphone app that was meant to be integral to controlling the virus, but has yet to materialise. Other key actors include Serco, the multinational outsourcing company that has previously been contracted to run everything from prisons to air traffic control – and, at a cost of £108m, was recently put in charge of recruiting and training thousands of call centre workers to establish contact with infected people and ensure that anyone they had been close to went into self-isolation.
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