A town with few Covid cases kept in strict lockdown by the tier system

sir – Lincolnshire – a large, essentially rural county – will be placed in Tier 3 after the national lockdown ends on December 2. When it outlined the reintroduction of tiers, the Government said it would be looking at case levels, spread among the population, and pressure on hospitals.

I live in Bourne, a rural market town in South Lincolnshire, a few miles from the border with Rutland and Peterborough, which will both be in Tier 2. In my electoral ward, there were four cases in the seven days to November 20 – way below the national average. Adherence to the restrictions in the town has been good and rates have been extremely low throughout the pandemic. Any hospital admissions are to Peterborough City Hospital, which will be in Tier 2.

And yet the Government has chosen to lump us in with coastal places such as Skegness and Boston, which are 40 minutes’ drive away and with which we have no public transport links.

As a result, our local pubs and hotels (which have all spent huge amounts on outdoor eating areas) will remain closed, we will not be able to travel into Peterborough (our nearest city), and mixing will effectively be banned.

Compliance with restrictions is to a large degree dependent on the public, as legal enforcement is not practicable. For the public to comply there needs to be logic – something that is plainly lacking in these broad-brush decisions. Helen Elliot

Bourne, Lincolnshire

sir – Before the second lockdown I was in Tier 1. A month later, the situation is so improved that I will be in Tier 2. The reality is that this is a political sop to those northern regions still sadly in Tier 3 – a demonstration that we are all in this together.

Rather than dragging the whole country down in pseudo-solidarity, it might be more useful to identify what the specific problems are in the North that mean infection rates remain high, and to address them directly.

Mark Jamison

Fetcham, Surrey sir – Let us hope that the Prime Minister has been better advised before his latest tier decisions than he was when he forced us into a second national lockdown.

Sir David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for risk and evidence communication at the University of Cambridge, told a Commons select committee this week that it was “completely inappropriate” to present the projection of 4,000 deaths a day by late November, criticising the presentation of such spurious data as a justification for the decisions that were being made, and adding: “No matter what you say about scenarios they will be interpreted as predictions.”

It is shocking that the responsibility for this inappropriate behaviour lies with none other than the person appointed by the Government to “ensure and improve the quality and use of scientific evidence and advice in government”, namely Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser. Hugh Brass