Greater Manchester metro mayor Andy Burnham has warned the city could take legal action against the government if Boris Johnson tries to impose tougher coronavirus restrictions against its will.
In a joint statement, Mr Burnham and the 10 leaders of Greater Manchester councils have rejected pressure to move the city onto the Tier 3 Covid alert level as “unacceptable” and “fundamentally flawed”.
They warned that the government’s current strategy risked plunging much of northern England in the harshest level of restrictions for much of the winter.
Downing Street today said that Boris Johnson wants to “create the maximum possible local consensus” behind the introduction of the most severe level of regional restrictions, which involve the closure of pubs and restaurants and tight restrictions on social mixing.
But Mr Johnson’s official spokesman added: “The Government does have the ability to impose measures if it was felt that was what was needed to reduce transmission and to protect the NHS.”
Warning that such changes in Manchester would be “by imposition, not consent”, Mr Burnham told an online press conference: “We are law abiding people, we would respect the law of the land, but we would consider other routes, legal routes, where we could protect our many thousands of residents who are going to be left in severe hardship in the run up to Christmas.
“We would not just leave them in the lurch, we would try and support them and that would include any legal action we could take on their behalf.”
Some of the Manchester leaders said a nationwide circuit-break, of the kind proposed by Sir Keir Starmer, would be better than the extension of top-tier regional restrictions to ever-wider areas.
No decision on the extension of Tier 3 measures to Greater Manchester and Lancashire is expected imminently, after a lunchtime “Gold Command” meeting between health secretary Matt Hancock and senior advisers concluded without an announcement.
But at prime minister’s questions Boris Johnson piled pressure on local leaders to co-operate in return for the financial support and local participation in test and trace operations which he is offering.
Mr Johnson told MPs that he wanted Starmer to “get on to his Labour friends in those parts of the north of England where we want to work with them to put those very stringent measures in place in order to deliver the reductions that the whole country wants to see”
In their joint statement, Mr Burnham, his deputy Beverley Hughes and the leaders of all 10 Greater Manchester councils said that the evidence does not currently support moving the city onto Tier 3 while infection rates at 357 per 100,000 are significantly lower than the 488 level in the Liverpool City region.
And they said that the financial package on offer to support Tier 3 areas was “nowhere near sufficient to prevent severe hardship, widespread job losses and business failure”.
“At the prime minister’s press conference on Monday, the chief medical officer said that Tier 3 measures would only limit the spread if they included much more widespread business closures than the baseline of pubs,” said the Manchester leaders.
“However, the Government has not put in a place an economic package to support this level of business closure.
“For that reason, we believe the Tier 3 proposal is fundamentally flawed.
“The government is placing councils in an invidious position. If councils adopt the CMO’s advice, they will better control the virus but cause substantial economic damage which will take a long time to repair.
“If they only follow the baseline requirements, they will reduce the harm to the economy but fail to bring down the rate of infection.
“Neither is an acceptable option and that is why the Tier 3 proposal is unacceptable to us as it stands.”
The leaders said they “reject the Government’s current drive to pile pressure on places to enter Tier 3”.
They challenged the offer of local control of test and trace services as an inducement to accept Tier 3 status, saying that this should be available in all parts of England and is likely to be most effective in less hard-hit areas in Tiers 1 and 2.
And they warned: “If the government pursues its current strategy, we believe it will leave large parts of the north of England trapped in Tier 3 for much of the winter, with all the damage that will do.
“If cases continue to rise as predicted, and the government continues to refuse to provide the substantial economic support that Tier 3 areas will need, then a number of leaders in Greater Manchester believe a national circuit break, with the required financial support, would be a preferable option.
“This would create the conditions for a re-set of the Test and Trace service into a more locally-controlled operation which, with cases driven down to a lower level, would be more likely to succeed.”
