UK Covid live: No 10 refuses to back health chief’s call for people to avoid unnecessary socialising

Ministers have failed to provide proper evidence to justify their decision to require all frontline NHS staff to get vaccinated, a Lords committee says today.

In a report (pdf), the Lords secondary legislation scrutiny committee says that the Department of Health and Social Care’s own figures suggest the benefits will not justify the cost.

Sajid Javid, the health secretary, announced earlier this month that all frontline NHS staff will need to be fully vaccinated from 1 April next year.

But the committee says:

DHSC’s figures anticipate that, of the 208,000 currently unvaccinated workers in the sector, this legislation will result in 54,000 (26%) additional staff being vaccinated and 126,000 (61%) losing their jobs as a result of not complying with the requirement of being vaccinated: this seems a disproportionately small gain for legislation that is anticipated to cause £270m in additional costs and major disruption to the health and care provision at the end of the grace period. The house may expect to be provided with some very strong evidence to support this policy choice, and DHSC has signally failed to do so.

Lord Hodgson, the Conservative peer who chairs the committee, said:

We fully support high levels of vaccination, but DHSC is accountable to parliament for its decisions and needs to give us a clear statement of the effect of these regulations, the effect of doing nothing and any other solutions considered, so parliament fully understands all the consequences of what it is being asked to agree to. This is particularly important when the NHS is already under such pressure.

DHSC has provided no single coherent statement to explain and justify its intended policy, and this undermines the ability of the house to undertake effective scrutiny of the proposed legislation.

The Downing Street lobby briefing has just finished, and No 10 has delivered an unusually firm rebuke to Dr Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, on the subject of socialising at Christmas. (See 9.31am.) It seems that Boris Johnson is in favour of “socialising when we don’t particularly need to” (Harries’s phrase).

The Sun’s Harry Cole has the key quotes.

The PM’s spokesman also revealed that Harries attended cabinet this morning to give an update on Covid.

The British Retail Consortium has said that people working in shops should not be expected to enforce the new law forcing customers to wear masks in retail premises. Helen Dickinson, the BRC chief executive, said:

Retailers will be communicating the new rules on face coverings in England through in-store signage and other channels.

However, it is vital that we do not place hardworking retail staff in harm’s way, and enforcement of face coverings must remain the duty of the authorities.

And Richard Walker, managing director of Iceland, told the Today programme this morning that he would not be asking staff in his stores to enforce mask wearing by customers. He said:

The question isn’t whether or not we should mandate face masks, but whether we can mandate them. What I won’t be doing is asking my store colleagues to police those who refuse to adhere to the rules. They are already working under significant pressure, particularly as we hit the busiest trading month of the year.

The University of Oxford has said that it can “rapidly” update its Covid-19 vaccine “if it should be necessary” amid rising concerns about the Omicron variant. A university spokesperson said today:

Due to the very recent discovery of the new B.1.1.529 [Omicron] strain of coronavirus, there are limited data available at this time.

As with any new variant, we will carefully evaluate the implications of the emergence of B.1.1.529 for vaccine immunity.

Despite the appearance of new variants over the past year, vaccines have continued to provide very high levels of protection against severe disease and there is no evidence so far that Omicron is any different.

However, we have the necessary tools and processes in place for rapid development of an updated Covid-19 vaccine if it should be necessary.

Labour is not moving right of the political spectrum but instead moving north, Lisa Nandy has claimed.

Commenting on yesterday’s reshuffle, Nandy, who yesterday was moved from shadow foreign secretary to shadow levelling up secretary, told Sky News:

We’re moving north; left or right, you can keep that debate. We’re going out into the country and we’re going to start delivering for people in towns, villages and cities that have been completely and utterly abandoned by the political system.

You go to Grimsby, you go to Barnsley, you go to Aberdeen, you will find proud communities that have a contribution to make.

But so often they are held back, not by the skills of their young people, not by the abilities in those communities, not by their own ambition, but by a national government that isn’t investing in the infrastructure that would bring good jobs.

© Provided by The Guardian
Lisa Nandy. Photograph: Sky News

Scotland’s health minister, Humza Yousaf, has confirmed three more cases of the Omicron variant, raising the tally to five in Lanarkshire and four in Greater Glasgow and Clyde health boards, as questions continue about how the variant ended up there.

He told BBC Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme that “nothing that links these cases back to Cop26 or the [South Africa-Scotland] rugby match. Of the current cases that we have found that timing would be off to link them”.

Yousaf said that more than 200 positive cases from Cop26 had been re-examined in the light of the new variant.

The six cases confirmed on Monday were not linked to travel, according to the Scottish government, and suggested a degree of community transmission.

At yesterday’s Covid briefing, Scotland’s chief medical officer, Gregor Smith said that the first Omicron case in Scotland was tested six days ago. “The earliest indication we have at this moment in time – and I stress at this moment in time – is that the first positive PCR test in relation to this, a confirmed case, is the 23rd of November,” he said.

But he also explained that health officials were conducting a “loop back exercise” of going through previous PCR tests back to 16 November now that they know what to look for as an indication of the Omicron variant.

He said that one of the “quirks” of the new variant was the presence of an “S-gene dropout or negative on PCR testing”. This allowed specialises to identify a potential Omicron case before genomic sequencing and allowed them to make immediate contact with individuals to undertake advanced contact tracing.

Nicola Sturgeon confirmed that the “loop back exercise” had led to the identification of all six cases in Scotland yesterday.

In his statement to MPs yesterday Sajid Javid, the health secretary, suggested that if it turns out that the Omicron variant is no more dangerous than Delta, then the new measures coming into force today will be lifted. The government expects to have a much better idea of the threat posed by Omicron within three weeks and Javid seemed to be dangling before MPs the possibility of the latest restrictions could be gone before Christmas.

That is what the more lockdown-sceptic Conservatives (a significant chunk of the parliamentary party) want to hear. But is it remotely probable? In her Today interview, Dr Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), was repeatedly asked if she could imagine saying to ministers in two or three weeks’ time that the latest measures could be lifted. Harries rather skilfully avoided answering the question directly, although astute listeners may have concluded that, if forced to give an answer, it would have been “probably not”.

Here are the key points.

• Harries played down the prospect of the latest Covid restrictions being lifted before Christmas. She would not answer when she was asked if she could imagine this happening, but she stressed the possible threat posed by Omicron and said that it was important to be “very careful”. She said the new measures were designed to give the authorities time to study the threat posed by the new variant. She also said that escalating the booster programme would give Britain better protection.

• She said it was “highly likely” that the vaccines would offer some protection against Omicron. But she said it was also “likely” that that effectiveness would be reduced.

• She said, even if vaccines offer some protection against Omicron, the new variant could still lead to hospitals coming under significantly more pressure. Asked about the prospect of the latest measures being lifted before Christmas, she said:

I think we do need to be very careful … In the winter we know there’s a strong demand on our hospital system for other reasons, not just from Covid, and I think a critical point here is, even if the vaccines appear to be effective but we find that the variant is more highly transmissible, having lowish grade infection but in very large numbers of the population could still [have] a significant impact on our hospitals.

• She encouraged people to cut back on unnecessary socialising over winter while the threat posed by Omicron remains unclear. (See 9.31am.)

• She said there has been no significant rise in the presence of S-gene target failure in the positive Covid cases being examined in the UK. S-gene target failure is not proof of Omicron (other variants feature it), but given that it is now very rare, and that Omicron does feature it (or S-gene dropout, as it is sometimes called), it is a good indicator for Omicron. “We have seen no rise, no significant rise, from the normal 1 in 1,000 cases that we would normally have,” she said.

• She said early reports about Omicron having only a mild impact in South Africa should be treated with caution because its population was so different. She said the average age of the population in South Africa is 27. In the UK it is 41. And she said Omicron, like other coronavirus variants, is thought to be much worse for older people not younger younger.

© Provided by The Guardian
Jenny Harries. Photograph: Reuters

Richard Moore, the head of MI6, has warned about China’s use of financial and data power to wield influence as he set out the need for Britain’s spies to work with the global tech sector to maintain cutting-edge capabilities, PA Media reports. PA says:

Moore said Beijing used “debt traps and data traps” to get countries and individuals “on the hook”.

The increasing complexity of the technology being used around the world meant MI6’s “boffins” were unable to meet the challenges alone and outside help was needed, he added.

Moore used rare public appearances on Tuesday to set out the need for a “sea change” in the culture of the Secret Intelligence Service.

The changing nature of the work meant that a James Bond-style Q figure is no longer able to provide all the technological capabilities required by MI6, he said.

“Given the challenges to the way in which we go about recruiting and running secret agents, if you look at some of the technology that is available to authoritarian regimes around so-called smart cities, technologies, surveillance etc then clearly, in order to stay ahead of that, we can’t do all of this in-house,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today.

“As you say, we can’t do it in our Q labs, the boffins behind the wire-type model doesn’t work for us any more.”

Good morning. We’ve got another day where politics will be largely dominated by news and debate about the measures being taken in response to the emergence of the Omicron variant. There will be a debate and vote in the Commons, statements from the Scottish and Welsh governments, and a press conference from Boris Johnson this afternoon, focusing on booster vaccines. And this morning Dr Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), has been on the Today programme. The new Covid restrictions for England announced by the government were relatively minimal compared with what they might have been – many countries have significantly tougher rules for Delta – but Harries gave a hint of of how scientists’ preferences are some way ahead of what politicians are willing to legislate for when she said it would better if avoided unnecessary socialising.

Harries stressed that we still don’t know how serious is the threat posed by Omicron. Asked if she wanted to see more people working from home (a measure in the UK government’s plan B, but not one that it has yet implemented), Harries told the programme:

We’ve seen is, in fact, that not everybody has gone back to work. I’d like to think of it more in a general way, which is if we all decrease our social contacts a little bit, actually that helps to keep the variant at bay. So I think being careful, not socialising when we don’t particularly need to and particularly going and getting those booster jabs.

I will post more from her interview shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Boris Johnson chairs cabinet.

Morning: Keir Starmer chairs a meeting of his new shadow cabinet.

9.30am: Jonathan Brearley, chief executive of energy regulator Ofgem, gives evidence to the Lords industry and regulators committee about energy prices.

10.15am: Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, gives evidence to the Commons privileges committee about the powers committees should have to summon witnesses.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons. David Lammy will respond for Labour as the new shadow foreign secretary.

12.15pm: Eluned Morgan, the Welsh government’s health minister, holds a Covid briefing.

After 12.45pm: MPs begin a three-hour debate on the new Covid restrictions for England announced at the weekend.

After 2pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, gives a statement to the Scottish parliament on Covid.

Around 4pm: MPs begin a debate on an SNP motion censuring Boris Johnson for dishonesty and other breaches of standards.

Afternoon: Boris Johnson holds a press conference.

I will be covering UK Covid developments here, as well as non-Covid politics, but for global Covid developments, do read our global live blog.

Related: Covid live: Minister says ‘I’d rather over-react’ to variant as mask mandates back in England; Japan confirms first Omicron case

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