Markus Andrews

Health secretary Sajid Javid has tested positive for Covid-19, despite having received both vaccination jabs.In a video message on his Twitter feed, the health secretary said that his symptoms were “very mild” and he was self-isolating at home with his family.His initial positive test was provided by a quick-turnaround lateral flow test, and he is now awaiting confirmation from a PCR test, which is known to be more reliable.His 10-day self-isolation with his family extends to Monday 26 July.Mr Javid’s positive test sparked renewed calls for Boris Johnson to halt his planned relaxation of coronavirus restrictions in England on Monday, when legal requirements to socially distance and wear face-coverings will be lifted. The health secretary was photographed on Friday leaving 10 Downing Street after apparently having a meeting with Boris Johnson, sparking concerns of a new coronavirus scare at the top of government.He visited a care home in south London on Tuesday and attended the chamber of the House of Commons on Wednesday to open the debate on the Health and Social Care Bill, though it is not clear whether he was infected at that point.A positive PCR test would trigger an effort by NHS Test and Trace to identify contacts who may have been infected.Ministers, officials and Whitehall staff who have met the secretary of state over the last 48 hours now face the prospect of being called or “pinged” by the smartphone app over to be told that they too should go into self-isolation.Mr Javid, 51, said: “This morning I tested positive for Covid. I’m waiting for my PCR result, but thankfully I have had my jabs and symptoms are mild. “Please make sure you come forward for your vaccine if you haven’t already.”Mr Javid said he took the test after feeling “a bit groggy” on Friday night.“I’m now self-isolating at home with my family until I get the result of the PCR test,” he said. “I’m grateful that I’ve had two jabs of the vaccine, and so far my symptoms are very mild.”He urged anyone who has not yet taken up the offer of vaccines to “get out there and get them as soon as you can”. And he added: “If, like me, you might feel a bit groggy, or you think might have come into contact with someone who’s positive, please also take a lateral flow test too. “If everyone plays their part, you’re not only protecting yourself and your loved ones, but you’re also safeguarding the NHS and helping to preserve our way of life.”Mr Javid is the latest in a string of senior government ministers and officials to be struck by Covid-19, including his predecessor as health secretary Matt Hancock and prime minister Boris Johnson, who spent three days in intensive care last year.Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman Munira Wilson said: “I really wish Sajid Javid, his team and family are well, and all those he has been in contact with over recent days, including visits.“This shows no one is safe from this deadly virus. The government needs to rethink its reckless plans for Monday.“By easing all restrictions with cases surging, they are experimenting with people’s lives. Right now, they are pursuing a strategy of survival of the fittest, where the young and clinically vulnerable will be left defenceless.”Scientists warn that two doses of vaccine do not provide blanket protection to everyone from infection with Covid-19.Analysis by Public Health England shows that both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines offer better than 90 per cent efficacy against the dominant Delta variant of the virus after two doses, meaning that some of those with double jabs will still suffer “breakthrough” infections – though these are usually mild.BBC presenter Andrew Marr revealed that he was infected at the G7 summit in Cornwall in June, despite having received two vaccine doses. More

Boris Johnson is coming under mounting pressure to allow over-12s to be vaccinated against Covid, as the younger age group bears the brunt of a third wave of infections expected to reach record heights after final lockdown restrictions are lifted on Monday.The MHRA medicine safety regulator cleared the Pfizer vaccine for use in 12-15 year-olds as long ago as 4 June and reports suggest that Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisations has made a recommendation to ministers, but a decision is still awaited on extending jabs to under-18s.With positive coronavirus cases expected to reach 100,000 a day within the next fortnight – far above the record peak of around 60,000 in the UK’s second wave in January – leading virus experts have told The Independent that without rapid action on vaccination, hundreds of thousands of young people can expect to be infected over the summer and tens of thousands to suffer the debilitating effects of long Covid.With mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna already given to millions of over-12s in the US, Israel and other countries with no sign of significant ill-effects, they said any health concerns were far outweighed by the risks of what one warned was a “reckless and unethical” gamble on achieving herd immunity through the mass infection of the UK’s teenagers.The former director of immunisation at the Department of Health, David Salisbury, told The Independent that vaccination of children was desirable not only to protect their health, but to reduce the risk that they will spread Covid to parents and grandparents. He pointed to the long-standing practice of inoculating children as young as one against rubella to protect pregnant women from the disease.“If young people are indeed contributing to transmission, then they do have a responsibility both to their own health and to the health of other people,” said Prof Salisbury.“Subject to assurance about the vaccine safety – which is the role of the regulator – I think they should be included in the vaccine programme.”Amid chief medical officer Chris Whitty’s warning earlier this week that Covid hospitalisations are doubling every three weeks and could hit “scary numbers”, there is growing concern over the impact on younger age-groups. These groups are currently thought to be driving the spread of the disease and have no protection from vaccines – or only a limited protection in over-18s who have had one jab, estimated to be only around 30 per cent effective in preventing serious illness from the Delta variant.Figures released by the Office for National Statistics this month showed that 34,000 young people aged 2-16 have reported suffering long Covid effects of headache, extreme fatigue, insomnia and cold-like symptoms for 12 or more weeks after their initial infection – which in many cases was mild – and 13,000 for a year or more.Epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani of Queen Mary University London told The Independent: “We need to start offering vaccines to the age groups where most of the transmission is happening – the adolescents and young adults – because we cannot bring this under control without that.“Those groups do suffer severe impact from Covid. They may not die or get hospitalised as often, but many of them do get long-term illness and get disabled.”Dr Gurdasani – a driving force behind the Lancet letter signed by 1,200 medics and scientists, denouncing the big-bang removal of lockdown restrictions – said that the safety and efficacy cases for vaccinating over-12s was “clear”.“If they can’t make that decision I want to know why,” she said. “It needs to be put in place urgently. There are clinically vulnerable children who right now have absolutely no option but to attend crowded classrooms and take the risk of being infected, when infection rates in their age-groups are at the highest, and that should not be happening.”Dr Gurdasani said there was also a case for cutting the interval between doses from eight to three weeks for those aged 18 or over, many of whom are currently pushing for early jabs in the hope of being able to holiday abroad this summer.While a shorter gap between jabs was “sub-optimal” from a medical point of view, it could play a role in reducing the heightened risk of transmission created by the government’s “highly reckless strategy”, she said.Leeds University associate virology professor Stephen Griffin said it was “crazy and unfair” to simply “allow this virus to pass through the younger population” on the basis that they are less vulnerable to serious illness and death from the initial infection than older age-groups.Even if only 3 per cent of teenage Covid cases result in hospitalisation, that could still mean thousands of younger patients arriving on wards each day over the summer, he warned.“It’s not the case that they are invulnerable,” said Dr Griffin. “They are less likely to be sick and less likely to stay in hospital for as long. But it’s still damaging and it’s still potentially a very difficult thing for the NHS to deal with in terms of numbers and capacity, particularly with the huge backlog of patients they have.“I think it’s just wholly irresponsible to allow this to happen. Even a small percentage of a very large number is still a large number.”The vice-president of Warwick Medical School, Prof Lawrence Young, told The Independent that as well as the “real risk” of long Covid resulting persistent consequences to as many as 13 per cent of infected people in younger age groups, new evidence was emerging of the virus affecting the organs of younger patients.Population immunity will require around 85 per cent of the total population to be protected through vaccines or prior infection, which cannot be achieved if under-18s are left out of the jabs programme, he warned. At present, only around 52 per cent of the total population – or 67 per cent of the adult population – have received two doses.“I don’t understand why we’re not vaccinating over-12s,” said Prof Young. “It would have been a really sensible thing to do while the youngsters were still in school, so you had them in one place and could get it done quickly.“The vaccines work perfectly well and are perfectly safe, millions of kids have been vaccinated in the States. It’s not an ethical problem.“I don’t think younger folk are completely immune and we really don’t understand what the longer-term consequences will be for individuals and indeed for the health service.” More

As England braces for the removal of remaining coronavirus restrictions on Monday, top medics are pleading with the public not to take advantage of new freedoms to ditch social distancing and face-masks and to stick to the lockdown rules of “Hands, Face, Space”.The plea came as a new poll for The Independent found that a majority (52 per cent) of Britons expect another lockdown before the end of the year, against just a third (33 per cent) believing the country will get to the end of 2021 without the reimposition of curbs.More than half (54 per cent) said Boris Johnson should have delayed step 4 of his roadmap out of lockdown beyond 19 July, against just a third (33 per cent) who said he was right to go ahead. And Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth said it was “not too late” for the PM to U-turn on the removal of mandatory mask-wearing in enclosed public places.The vice-president of Warwick Medical School, Prof Lawrence Young, told The Independent that the decision to press ahead with step 4 at a time when infection rates are running above 50,000 a day was “frightening”.“It’s like taking your seatbelt off while you’re speeding over 100 miles an hour on the motorway,” said Prof Young. “Removing all restrictions when daily case numbers are rapidly climbing and many people still not fully vaccinated is basically bonkers.”The announcement of a beefed-up flu vaccination campaign this winter was an indication that ministers expect a “messy situation” with respiratory diseases later in the year, he said.Recent days have seen the government back away from the prime minister’s earlier claims about the irreversibility of so-called Freedom Day, with minister Lucy Frazer confirming on Friday that further restrictions will be imposed if infections and hospitalisations reach “unacceptable” levels.With businesses including nightclubs opening on Monday, work-from-home guidance relaxed and social distancing and face-coverings moving from a legal requirement to a question of personal responsibility, health secretary Sajid Javid – who himself tested positive on Saturday – has warned infections could swiftly reach 100,000 a day. Chief medical officer Chris Whitty said numbers could reach “scary” levels and England could “get into trouble again surprisingly fast”.Scotland will also relax restrictions on Monday, but face-coverings will remain mandatory.Far from celebrating “Freedom Day” by casting off all restraint, the new poll by Savanta ComRes suggests that a majority are concerned about the potential consequences of returning to mask-free social mixing.Some 60 per cent of 2,137 people questioned for The Independent said they were “worried” about the removal of restrictions, including 23 per cent – almost a quarter of the population – who said they were “very worried”. Highest levels of concern were found among older people, but a majority in every age-group and region of the country said they were anxious about the move.An overwhelming 73 per cent said they would keep wearing face-coverings on public transport, 69 per cent in shops and 61 per cent in pubs and restaurants, while 45 per cent will do so outside.The professor of intensive care at University College London, Hugh Montgomery, urged the public to maintain the protective measures in place during earlier phases of lockdown.“The message that we ‘are back to normal’ makes no sense,” said Prof Montgomery.“There is no ‘going back to 2019’. And now is not the time for allowing mass mixing in confined spaces, nor the absence of masks.“The problem with shifting responsibility to the individual is that it isn’t only the people who ‘abandon all rules’ who may suffer – it is the others to whom the disease spreads. We also create an incubator for new variants. Long Covid is not something I’d wish to have, or that I’d wish on anyone else.“So the message has to be, whatever the law, please stay in the open as much as one can when meeting, use masks when close to people, avoid confined spaces with many people in them and so forth. In other words, ‘Hands, Face, Space’ has to remain.”The Hands Space Face campaign launched in August last year guides people to wash their hands frequently, wear face coverings in public places and maintain distance from people outside their household.Prof Montgomery warned that huge numbers of people remain vulnerable to Covid-19, with a tenth of the adult population still to receive their first dose of vaccine and one-third waiting for the second, while there has been no routine vaccination for under-18s. A proportion of double-jabbed adults will not receive adequate protection from the vaccine, and there are concerns that the immunity conferred on the UK’s oldest people by the first jabs in December may be starting to wane, he said.Lifting restrictions at a time of rapidly rising infections “can only make things worse”, warned Prof Montgomery.“The vaccine doesn’t stop one getting Covid,” he said. “Cases are on the very steep rise, and there has been a misunderstanding about the relationship between cases and hospitalisations. Hospitalisation lags five-plus days behind cases and deaths three-plus weeks in general.“Currently, it seems that fully 2 per cent of cases are admitted to hospital. We had a quarter of a million cases in the last week. We are already now seeing 50,000 cases per day – the equivalent of 1.5m per month.“The NHS is trying to cope with the backlog of other diseases. It is seeing a huge surge in ‘winter viruses’. And now Covid. The last two also make staff sick – so fewer staff to care for greater numbers of patients. So lifting restrictions when this is already happening can only make things worse.”Prof Young said that as well as concerns about deaths and hospitalisations from the Delta variant and the threat of long Covid, the removal of restrictions heightened fears of the UK’s highly-infected population becoming a breeding ground for potentially dangerous new mutant strains. And he said that 19 July would not be a Freedom Day for 3.8m clinically extremely vulnerable people, who may be forced to return to shielding as others drop protective measures.“The worry is this is just going to allow the virus to spread and generate new variants that can be even more infectious than the Delta variant and also be able to escape vaccine protection,” he said. “That’s the biggest worry as people switch off their apps and think we’re back to normal. We’re not.“I do feel that we need to continue with some restrictions and be cautious for a little bit longer. I hate to say it, but if all those horrible things come together, then it’s possible that we’ll end up having to go into some form of lockdown again.Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: “At a time when Covid infections are surging, Boris Johnson’s decision to remove all restrictions without mitigations like mask-wearing, working from home, isolation support and ventilation in place is reckless.“There is still time for Boris Johnson to U-turn on this ‘throwing all caution to the wind’ escapade by following the scientific advice to maintain precautions such as mask-wearing.”A government source said:“The vaccine programme and diligence of the public have got us to this point. But as the data on case numbers and hospitalisations show, the pandemic is not over.“We need people to continue being vigilant, to ensure they’re thinking about others and doing things like wearing a face covering in confined spaces. That way we can can continue to protect the NHS and each other, and make the pathway out of this much easier.” More

Britain’s former health secretary publicly promised to test all staff and residents in care homes last year, despite being told his deadline was impossible by senior officials.Matt Hancock, who resigned last month after he was revealed to be having an affair with an aide and non-executive director of the health department Gina Coladangelo, dismissed advice from officials about testing capacity in April, May and June last year.There have been more than 42,000 care home resident deaths involving coronavirus in England and Wales according to the Office for National Statistics. The Care Quality Commission is expected to release data on deaths per care home this week.Mr Hancock told a Downing Street press conference in May 2020 that every resident and care home worker would be tested every two weeks by the start of June. However, this promise rested on having sufficient capacity for rapid test kits, which officials said would not be available for several months at meetings in April, May, and June.However, the former health secretary, who is still an MP, repeatedly told officials to “come back with a different answer” when they said a supply crunch made the government’s commitment impossible to fulfill.A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care did not respond ahead of publication.The Covid-19 test shortage had been exacerbated in the spring and summer of 2020 as a result of the delay and then withdrawal of lateral flow kits ordered from Randox. Supply problems were raised with Mr Hancock in April and May, ahead of the eventual withdrawal of some Randox test kits in June.Nevertheless, Mr Hancock pressed ahead with a public commitment in May which was unsustainable and ultimately unfulfilled, officials said. One official claimed that Mr Hancock had put extra pressure on staff because he had “overpromised” in public and at cabinet meetings.Liz Kendall, Labour shadow social care minister said: “It’s concerning that the former Health Secretary made promises to care home residents and families that went against the advice of his own health experts.”She added: “When the government finally launches its public inquiry into their handling of the coronavirus pandemic, it must be absolutely clear about what advice the minister received and when. Families of loved ones who died in care homes deserve to know the truth.”Randox, which won a £133m contract to deliver kits, was intended to be a leading provider of test kits to care homes and in other health care settings including hospitals, officials said. An overreliance on the company directly contributed to the delay in getting regular testing in place in care homes, they added.In July 2020, some 750,000 test kits from Randox had to be recalled after they were found to contain swabs which were not sterile. Both its original contract for the test kits in March and a further six-month extension to that contact were awarded without a competitive process.Professor Martin Green, chief executive of Care England said that “right from the outset” his body had “called for adult social care to be placed at the forefront of the Government’s testing plan.” He added that testing, vaccination and PPE continue to underpin safeguarding of the sector.Officials’ description of an impossible promise comes after former top Downing Street aide, Dominic Cummings, told MPs that Mr Hancock had lied about testing hospital patients ahead of discharge to care homes. Mr Hancock has vehemently denied that he lied about the matter.It was also reported that the Prime Minister had described the former health secretary as “hopeless” in a WhatsApp message. More

A Conservative MP who is co-chairman of parliament’s cross-party group on eating disorders has been accused of fat shaming after he appeared to make fun of a nurse’s weight on Twitter.Scott Benton, who is member for Blackpool South, suggested health worker David Colldash looked like he had eaten more Greggs pasties than was good for him.The extraordinary exchange came after Mr Colldash – a Labour councillor in the seaside town – highlighted how the MP had been lobbying for a so-called super casino in the resort after last month accepting thousands of pounds worth of sports tickets and hospitality from three separate gambling organisations.“Greggs once gave me a free pasty so I’ve sold the town hall to the Great British Bake-off,” joked Mr Colldash.Apparently piqued by the criticism, Mr Benton, replied: “More than one free pasty I suspect by the looks of it,” followed by a head-in-hands emoji. But if the come back was supposed to be “light-hearted” – as the 34-year-old MP later claimed – it was almost immediately slammed by other users on the social media site.“Are you aware of how damaging this tweet is to some struggling with an eating disorder or who is genetically predisposed to having a larger body than the media imposed norm,” asked user Pete Roberts. “Absolutely disgraceful from an MP.”Another kept it simpler: “You’re an MP,” wrote Nick Pettigrew. “Show just a shred of dignity.”Mr Benton had told LancsLive that: “[Mr Colldash is] a Labour Party Councillor who frequently posts unwelcome and unpleasant comments on my social media pages.” “My response to him is light hearted and in the same vein as his original tweet.”Mr Benton, who has previously breached parliamentary rules by not declaring interests, accepted almost £8,000 worth of free hospitality last month for Euro 2020 games, Wimbledon and Royal Ascot.The trough included a ticket to England v Czech Republic from Gamesys, an online casino and bingo company, worth £1,537.60; hospitality to Royal Ascot from the Betting and Gaming Council worth £1,400; a ticket to Wimbledon from Entain worth £1,400; and another ticket from Entain to England v Denmark worth £3,457.He has since defended himself by saying he registered all gifts and his support for a casino in Blackpool predated the freebies.Eating disorder charity, Beat, who help run the parliamentary group has declined to comment on the incident. More

The UK has been forced to reopen its trade deal with Ukraine, one of its most sensitive post-Brexit agreements, after errors were made in the original text, The Independent can reveal.The pact was signed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in October last year, and lauded as a key example of Britain’s post-Brexit trade and foreign policies. The agreement not only covers the commercial relationship between Britain and the eastern European country but also defence cooperation to support Kiev’s sovereignty. It follows the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, an area still internationally recognised as part of Ukraine. It also came amid a deterioration of relations between Moscow and London in the aftermath of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. UK-Ukraine ties were again thrust into the spotlight last month when Russia claimed it had fired warning shots at a British vessel as it passed close to the Crimean peninsula. Underscoring the political importance of the agreement in October Johnson said the UK was “Ukraine’s most fervent supporter”. He added: “Whether it’s our defence support, stabilisation efforts, humanitarian assistance or close cooperation on political issues, our message is clear: we are utterly committed to upholding the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine”.However, two officials told The Independent that the pact was already having to be reworked after mistakes were noted in the drafting of trade chapters. Some of the errors are a result of copying and pasting sections that bind the UK to EU rules, the same officials said. Problems emerged when the trade department sought to create guidance on how the deal should be used by businesses in February and March, after the deal came into force in January. However, the fact that the deal needed fresh negotiation and drafting was not made public by the trade Department for International Trade. One of the same government officials said that this was a deal that “no one wanted to get wrong”. Particularly as the deal was subject to especially close scrutiny by the European Union, they added. Separately, an EU official told The Independent that they had noted that agreement bound the UK to rules in some areas that they had not expected.A spokesperson for the Department for International Trade said: “It is standard practice for small sections of agreements to be amended and updated over time to reflect developments, or to add greater clarity that is helpful to businesses.”However, one of the same officials familiar with the agreement’s development said that the changes which needed to be made were not minor, and could have a significant impact on businesses. They added that they amounted to errors rather than an update.One business with operations in Ukraine, which the official wouldn’t name due to commercial sensitivities, had also flagged additional issues with the text, they said. The issues touched on trade in both services and goods the official confirmed.Emily Thornberry, Labour’s shadow international trade secretary said: ”This is not the only time the government has made basic errors when rolling over our EU treaties, but it is by far the most serious.” “Of all the 67 non-EU countries with whom the UK signed rollover agreements in 2019 and 2020, the Ukraine deal was the only one considered of sufficient strategic importance to be signed by the Prime Minister himself, making it all the more astonishing that it is now having to be re-written,” Ms. Thornberry added. “This act of gross incompetence needs to be not just immediately rectified, but urgently explained.” The sensitivity of UK-Ukraine relations was underlined in the government’s recent Integrated Review of its defence and foreign policy strategy. One section on Russia notes that Britain will increase support for countries in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, “where we will continue to build the capacity of its armed forces.”Sam Lowe, senior fellow at the Centre for European Reform said that while mistakes in trade deals are “unfortunate but not entirely uncommon”. He added that was unsurprising that it’s happened with a rollover agreement” because these have tended to include more copying and pasting of text than fresh deals. “It’s a deeper agreement than others and includes commitments to follow EU rules in some areas. And if there’s one thing we’ve learnt it’s that the UK government doesn’t like to be bound by EU rules,” Mr. Lowe said.A former senior Australian trade negotiator told The Independent that it is correct that agreements sometimes need to be amended, but that substantial changes weren’t often made so soon after the text of an agreement is finalised.The ex-negotiator said this might be indicative of the trade department’s rush to secure agreements in order to ensure continuity after Brexit. Small, incorrect changes or a failure to make the right change in treaties can cause “big headaches”, they said. Given the rush to roll over agreements, the public should expect further trade deals to be revisited in the coming months, they said, adding: “Copy and paste can be dangerous.” More

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been reported to the UK’s statistics watchdog over Labour claims he misled the public with claims that numbers in poverty are falling – at a time when internationally recognised measures show they have risen by 1.5m under Tory rule.Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Bridget Phillipson said the “cowardly” chancellor was corroding public trust by trying to cover up the truth on “appalling” inequalities which have seen the numbers of children in poverty rise to 4.2m.Boris Johnson has been repeatedly rapped over the knuckles by the watchdog over his claims that poverty has fallen under the Tories, with Office for Statistics Regulation chief Ed Humpherson issuing a formal warning to Downing Street only last month that the prime minister’s cherry-picking of statistical measures was getting in the way of public understanding of the problem.The row arises from the government’s break with the practice of previous administrations and other countries which have used measures of “relative poverty” to establish how many of their citizens are deprived of the living standards generally enjoyed by those around them. Instead, Tory-led administrations have increasingly focused on “absolute poverty”, which measures real incomes compared to a fixed date in the past and tends to show falling levels of deprivation as societies get generally richer – except in times of recession.Only days after Mr Humpherson’s letter, Mr Sunak repeated the PM’s claim in a TV interview on 8 July in which he referred to falling “poverty” without making clear that the claim was correct only on the absolute measure.Defending his plan to cut £20 a week from Universal Credit payments to poorer households from September, the chancellor cited the record of the Conservative government in ensuring that “the number of people in poverty had fallen” in the years ahead of the coronavirus pandemic.In fact, the proportion living in relative poverty rose steadily in the years before Covid from 15 to 18 per cent between 2012 and 2020 before housing costs are taken into account and from 21 to 22 per cent after housing costs. By contrast, the absolute poverty level fell from 16 to 14 per cent before housing costs and 22 to 18 per cent after housing costs.In her letter to the UK Statistics Authority, seen by The Independent, Ms Phillipson also raised concerns about comments made in the House of Commons by work and pensions minister Will Quince, who cited absolute poverty figures as proof that the country was in a “strong position” before the pandemic, without pointing out that relative poverty measures gave the opposite message.“The chancellor failed to clarify which poverty measure he was using, while the minister’s use of the ‘absolute poverty’ measure masks the true reality of poverty in the UK and risks misleading the public on this issue,” Ms Phillipson wrote.“Internationally the accepted way to measure poverty is by using the ‘relative poverty’ measure. Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, we have seen an increase of 1.5m people who live in relative poverty, after housing costs, across the country. The number of children living in relative poverty has been steadily rising over recent years, with the figure standing at 4.2m in the latest data.“These figures paint a very different picture of the government’s record on poverty than claimed by the chancellor.”She also blasted Mr Sunak’s claim in the same interview that inequality was falling before the pandemic, pointing to estimates from the Household Finances Survey which suggest that it rose steadily between April 2019 and March 2020.Ms Phillipson told The Independent: “The government’s record on child poverty in this country is appalling.  But rather than fix the problems they run away from the truth. It’s cowardly, and it corrodes trust.  They should focus on making work pay for families, not on dodging difficult questions.”Tony Blair enshrined both absolute and relative measures in the official metrics for judging progress on his target of abolishing child poverty, with both indicators having to fall in order for the government to claim success.But Iain Duncan Smith led an assault on the relative measure as work and pensions secretary, claiming that factors like family breakdown, workless households and educational attainment were better ways of judging a child’s life chances. His Welfare Reform and Work Act in 2016 ditched Blair’s targets and indicators, removing relative poverty from its central role in the government’s methods for judging its own success.Anti-poverty campaigners regard both absolute and relative measures of poverty as useful, but note that it is impossible to see from the absolute figure whether disadvantaged individuals and families are falling further behind the rich.The independent Joseph Rowntree Foundation uses the relative measure after housing costs as its headline figure for understanding what is happening with poverty.“JRF defines poverty as when someone’s resources are well below what is enough to meet their minimum needs,” explained the thinktank’s deputy director of evidence and impact Peter Matejic.“Relative poverty is defined as below 60 per cent of average incomes in any given year, whereas absolute poverty is defined as 60 per cent of incomes from a specific year, currently 2010/11.“Relative poverty is therefore able to measure whether people on lower incomes are catching up with those on higher incomes, and whether or not they are benefitting from overall economic growth. Absolute poverty measures when people on lower incomes see their incomes grow faster than the cost of living even if they are falling even further behind people higher up the income scale.”The Treasury declined to comment on Ms Phillipson’s letter. More

Lockdown restrictions may have to be reimposed in the autumn, as the reopening of society on Monday leads to a “long and drawn-out” third wave of coronavirus, Boris Johnson has been warned.A member of the government’s Sage scientific advisory committee, John Edmunds, said that the removal of restrictions in England on 19 July will delay the moment at which the wave reaches its peak and starts to subside.And former health secretary Jeremy Hunt warned that the government must be ready to “change direction” and bring back curbs to social and economic life if infections continue at record rates of 100,000 a day or more.Warning lights on the NHS are already “flashing red” with Covid hospital patients doubling every two weeks and predicted to reach 10,000 by the end of August, at a time when the service is struggling to make a dent in the massive backlog of patients awaiting treatment for other conditions, Mr Hunt told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.If infections remain high as schools return in September, the government will have to “reconsider some very difficult decisions” about restoring restrictions, he said.His comments came after chief medical officer Chris Whitty warned that England “could get into trouble again surprisingly fast”, with the potential for a “scary” rise in hospitalisations.With daily infections already above 50,000 two days before step 4 of Mr Johnson’s roadmap out of lockdown, epidemiologist Edmunds told Today that within the next two weeks numbers can be expected to hit 100,000 – well above the record peak reached in January.The absence of lockdown curbs means that, rather than the relatively rapid decline in infections seen after previous peaks, the UK is facing a “higher level of incidence for a protracted period right through the summer and probably through much of the autumn,” warned Prof Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.“We didn’t ease up restrictions after having vaccinated everybody,” he said. “We did it the other way – we started easing restrictions before everybody was vaccinated.“That’s going to lead to infections in the unvaccinated people, primarily younger individuals. It’s inevitable that that was going to happen.”Mr Hunt said: “The warning light on the NHS dashboard is not flashing amber, it’s flashing red. Covid hospital patients are doubling every two weeks and, according to the Health Service Journal, that means that we are heading for about 10,000 Covid hospital patients by the end of August, which is about 20 times higher than this time last year.“And on top of that, of course, you’ve got the Covid backlog where, for the first time in two decades, we’re seeing lots of people waiting two years for operations. So it’s a very serious situation.”The experience of countries like the Netherlands and Israel, which lifted restrictions after successful vaccination campaigns but are now considering returning to lockdown amid rising case rates, made clear that the onus is on the public to use its new freedoms responsibly over the coming weeks, said Mr Hunt.“If we behave like they have done and change our behaviour too dramatically when the restrictions are changed, then we are going to end up having to do what they are doing now, which is reconsider reimposing restrictions,” said the Commons Health Committee chair. “So a lot depends on our behaviour over the next couple of weeks.”There was little prospect of the reversal of moves out of lockdown during August, because transmission will naturally be limited by the fact that schools are closed and people will spend much of the time outdoors, he said.But he added: “Coming into September we’re almost certainly going to see infections reach a new daily peak going above the 68,000 daily level which was the previous record in January.“It will depend on what they’re doing when we come towards the end of the month. If they start to tail off and go down again then we hopefully can stay on the current trajectory.” but if they’re still going up as the schools are coming back, then I think we are going to have to reconsider some very difficult decisions.”Mr Hunt said the “herd immunity” offered by vaccinations and previous infections made him “hopeful” that a new lockdown can be avoided. But he added: “There is a lot of uncertainty, which is why it’s very important that the government is willing to change direction if that’s what the data says we have to do.”Meanwhile, a senior union official accused the government of approaching the reopening of the economy “through the prism of politics, rather than pragmatic common sense action”.Paul Nowak, deputy general secretary of the TUC, told BBC Breakfast: “What we’ve seen is strong workplace guidance – that unions and employers helped shape – that’s kept millions of people safe during the course of last year, replaced by vague exhortations, recommendations, guidelines.“I think it poses more questions for employers than it provides answers.” More