Boris Johnson has signalled that pubs and restaurants will be among the last parts of the economy to come out of lockdown in England, saying he will take a “cautious and prudent approach” to removing restrictions.
Speaking during a visit to a mass vaccination centre in Cwmbran, south Wales, the prime minister said he backed Sage scientist Professor Dame Angela McLean’s warning that any unlocking should be based on “data, not dates”.
Asked what the timetable for the return of hospitality industries would be, he declined to give any dates, but pointed to the experience after last year’s lockdowns, when pubs and restaurants were among the last to reopen.
Responding to Prof McLean’s comments to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Mr Johnson said: “I do think that’s absolutely right.
“That’s why we’ll be setting out what we can on Monday 22nd about the way ahead and it’ll be based firmly on a cautious and prudent approach to coming out of lockdown in such a way to be irreversible.
“We want to be going one way from now on, based on the incredible vaccination rollout that you’re seeing in Cwmbran.”
On the timetable for reopening pubs and restaurants, Mr Johnson said: “I certainly think that we need to go in stages, we need to go cautiously.
“You perhaps remember from last year that we opened up hospitality fully as one of the last things that that we did, because there is obviously an extra risk of transmission from hospitality.
“But we’ll be sending it all out on on Monday and I know there’s there’s a lot of understandable speculation in the in the papers and people are coming up with theories about what we’re going to do and what we’re going to say and about rates of infection and so on.
“I would just advise everybody just wait, we will try and say as much as we can on Monday.”
Mr Johnson said there were “encouraging signs” that the vaccination campaign was driving the recent decline in Covid-19 cases, but said it was still too early for a definitive judgement.
“I think that, overall, if you look at the infection rates across the UK, they are coming down a bit now. That’s very encouraging,” he said.
“I think one of the big questions people will want to ask is to what extent now is that being driven by vaccination. We hope it is, there are some encouraging signs, but it’s still early days.”
Mr Johnson said that the rate of vaccinations in the Cwmbran centre was “really outstanding”, improvising a rhyme in its praise.
“I think, as the song goes, ‘I’ve been all around the world and then Japan, I’ve never found a place for vaccines like Cwmbran’,” he said. “How about that?”
