PM sets out ‘oneway’ road to free us from lockdown
Schools return first in phased ‘roadmap’
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has set out his roadmap out of lockdown.
Schools will reopen on March 8, with twice weekly testing, and after-school sports and activities will be allowed to restart. Socially distanced one-to-one meetings with others outdoors in public spaces, such as for a coffee, will also be allowed. Care home residents can have a single visitor, provided they are tested and wear PPE.
From March 29, the rule of six will return and a new measure allowing two households to meet outdoors will be introduced.
Outdoor sports facilities such as tennis and basketball courts and open-air swimming pools are also set to reopen at the end of next month.
Organised adult and children’s sport – including grassroots football – can also return.
People should continue to work from home and minimise travel where possible.
In step two, from April 12, non essential retail will reopen, including personal care such as hairdressers. Gyms will reopen, as will holiday lets, for individuals and household groups only. Pubs will start to reopen outdoors and there will be no curfew and no requirement for alcohol to be accompanied by a substantial meal. Zoos, theme parks and drive-in cinemas will reopen, along with libraries. Step three will begin no earlier than May 17. Most restrictions on meeting outdoors will be lifted, to a limit of 30 people. Meeting indoors will be permitted, subject to the rule of six.
Pubs and restaurants will be opened indoors, along with hotels, children’s play areas, theatres, concert halls and crowds will be able to attend sports events, depending on size of venue.
Step four will start no earlier than June 21. Weddings will be permitted and nightclubs will be allowed to reopen, with larger events also given the go ahead. Mr Johnson said: “The threat remains substantial with the numbers in hospital only now beginning to fall below the peak of the first wave in April.” He warned that no vaccine could ever be 100% effective and added: “We cannot escape the fact that lifting lockdown will result in more cases, more hospitalisations and, sadly, more deaths.
“This would happen whenever lockdown is lifted, whether now or in six or nine months. It is so crucial this road map should be cautious but also irreversible. We are setting out on what I hope and believe is a one-way road to freedom and this journey is made possible by the pace of the vaccination programme.” But education bosses have raised concerns we are heading for a repeat of the start of term in September last year. Executive head of Fulston Manor in Sittingbourne and chair of the Kent Association Headteachers, Alan Brookes, said: “I think returning then is a high risk strategy. The idea of bringing everyone back at the same time has practical consideration and health considerations to so that’s our sticking point.
“Of course we are desperate to have children back to school but it’s got to be done safely and permanently. We do not need a situation where they come back on March 8 and then three or four weeks down the line there are closures again. That would be catastrophic.
“Vaccinations would have made a big difference. It would have been possible over the half term break in a single day to vaccinate all those people who work in schools across the country.
“That would have been a huge reassurance for staff. Nothing has gone in to schools that has made them safer than they were previously.”
‘We are setting out on what I hope and believe is a one-way road to freedom’
‘Catch-up’ on existing consents could warp development figures
More homes have been built in Maidstone than were required, new figures have revealed. As the borough works towards its Local Plan Review, which will increase its housing targets from 2020, comes the news that more homes have been completed over the last three years than were called for under the terms of the existing Local Plan. Each year the government publishes statistics for what it calls the Housing Delivery Test. It compares the number of new homes created over a rolling three-year period with the number of new homes required by an authority’s planning policies and expresses that as a percentage.
Any authority that falls below 100% - ie has built fewer homes than expected - can look forward to receiving some kind of sanction from the government, such as a requirement to make more land available for building. Maidstone scored 146% having built 3,787 homes in that period, when it only needed to build 2,592.
A council spokesman said:
“These figures can be misleading as they carry with them an element of historic under-delivery as the government’s baseline year for calculating housing delivery is still 2011.
“What may now appear as over-delivery, is in part, this lag being rectified through the build out of existing consents; the development of sites allocated in the 2017 Local Plan in order to make up for previous under-delivery; conversions of office stock in the town centre under permitted development rights and more recently some accelerated completions taking advantage of the stamp duty holiday.
“The number the council is planning for in our current Local Plan Review will be the prescribed number as per current government guidance. “The increase in our target number from 883 per annum to circa 1,214pa makes it very unlikely that we will exceed the target in future years.”