AN easing of the lockdown with different sectors lifting restrictions at different speeds looks set to be a key part of Boris Johnson’s “comprehensive plan” to get Britain’s economy moving again.
The Prime Minister will set out his road-map to recovery next Thursday. However, there are concerns that after six weeks of the lockdown the fear factor among the public could make easing the restrictions difficult.
An Ipsos Mori survey has suggested more than 60% of people would be uncomfortable about going out to bars and restaurants or using public transport, should ministers begin to relax the lockdown.
More than 40% of respondents said they would still be reluctant to go shopping or send their children to school while more than 30% would be worried about going back to work or meeting friends.
Leading statistician Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter suggested the UK Government’s stay-at-home message had “been, if anything, slightly too successful” and that people were “over-anxious” about the coronavirus.
Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, and other ministers have been engaging with captains of industry and union chiefs across several sectors to see how best lockdown measures could slowly be lifted while keeping the infection rate, known as R, below the key level of 1.
The easing of restrictions is likely to include clear social distancing measures in the workplace, enhanced hygiene such as widespread hand sanitisation and staggered work times to ensure a limited number of people are at work at any one time.
Robert Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, said the Government was “working with businesses, sector by sector, to think through how it would be safe to return to those factories or office settings or to construction sites, and how they can observe social distancing guidelines and protect the workforce”.
He stressed: “Those are ways in which we will instil much greater confidence in the future in the workforce.”
Mr Jenrick, whose portfolio also covers housing, said this sector as well as construction "on the whole" could go back to work now as the majority of work here was done outside and could be carried out in accordance with social distancing.
“We are, at the moment, where the country can take a message that is slightly nuanced and saying: 'This is what you need to do today but this is what the future looks like so that you and your family can start to prepare.'"
At the No 10 press briefing on Thursday, Mr Johnson said a “huge amount of work” had been going on behind the scenes regards an exit strategy and that the comprehensive plan would involve how the country could can get children back to school and back into childcare, how people could travel to work and how life in the workplace could be made safer.
He also said the Government’s plan would involve a “menu of options” with the dates and times of each individual measure very much driven by where the country was in the epidemic and what the data was saying.
The key measure now the Government is focusing on is the R rate of transmission. Certain lifting of the restrictions would have an impact on R. The key is to keep it down below 1; anything above this level would begin to increase transmission, possibly at an exponential rate, resulting in a further heavy lockdown, more deaths and damage to the economy.
At present, it is thought the R rate is between 0.6 and 0.9 with different levels in different parts of the country. It is thought, for example, reopening schools could lift the rate by 0.2.
Mr Jenrick explained that the country needed to "build some head room" between the rate of infection and 1 before lockdown measures could be eased.
"We want to bring R down further than it is today and that matters so that the NHS has sufficient capacity, so that when we do start to ease the lockdown, there's some space, some room, for manoeuvre."
He added that the Government approach was a "cautious easing over time," so that such headroom for the NHS could be maintained and protected.
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