When will Johnson call time on this back-of-a-beer-mat curfew policy?
‘Having pushed for a two-week “circuit breaker” – only to be opposed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak – the 10pm curfew was settled on as a compromise’
‘It does seem strange to think that concentrating trade in a smaller number of hours, rather than over the course of an evening, should suppress the virus’
All it took was a four-second video to expose the lack of thought behind the Government’s 10pm coronavirus curfew. Posted by House of Commons worker Kirsty Lewis following a night out in central London, it showed crowds thronging around Oxford Circus on the night the time limit came into force.
“10pm curfew just meant everyone rolling out on to the streets and onto the tubes at the same time and it was the busiest I’ve seen central London in months,” she posted alongside the footage, which has since been watched 3.5 million times.
Tobias Ellwood, the former minister, was among the first to pick up on the potential pitfall of turfing everyone out of pubs and restaurants at the same time, in the middle of a global pandemic. “We need to rethink this,” the Tory MP admitted, retweeting the post along with thousands of others.
Yet Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, defended it yesterday. He insisted the measures were “collectively vital for the strategy we are pursuing”.
It came after Philip Davies, the MP for Shipley, told the Commons the 10pm cut-off was doing untold damage to businesses and prompting “jobs to be lost, all just to see people congregating on the streets again”.
Having initially pushed for a two-week “circuit breaker” – only to be opposed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak and virtually everyone else in the room – the 10pm curfew was settled upon as a compromise.
It later emerged that the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) had not modelled the effect of the curfew and the behavioural science sub-group had not been consulted on how people might react.
The economic consequences also appeared to have been completely overlooked, with business minister Paul Scully forced to admit earlier this week that no assessment had been made before implementing the policy.
Greg Clark, the former business secretary said yesterday: “It does seem strange to think that concentrating trade in a smaller number of hours, and making everyone leave a pub or restaurant at the same time, rather than spacing them out over the course of an evening, should suppress rather than spread the virus.”
It isn’t only the fuzzy thinking behind that policy that has united all parties in condemnation. Even more problematically for Mr Hancock, the scientific basis upon which he initially argued for the time limit is disintegrating.
The Health Secretary stated that “elsewhere in the world they have introduced evening restrictions and then seen their case numbers fall”.
Yet while countries that introduced a curfew, such as Belgium, saw an initial fall in infection rates, new Covid cases are now rising sharply.
Not all the boffins are on side either. “The 10pm curfew will likely have little or no impact,” said Dr Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, when it was introduced on Sept 24. Dr David Strain, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter, said: “Closing down restaurants and pubs earlier will do little to stave the spread for as long as multiple different households can interchangeably meet up.”
Yet with such strong Tory opposition to a second lockdown on economic grounds, that option appears an impossibility, despite Boris Johnson’s insistence on Wednesday that more sacrifices might have to be made. With even Mr Hancock conceding yesterday that he would be happy to look at “other imaginative ideas”, yet another about-turn appeared to be in the offing.
Conservatives are understandably wondering when the Prime Minister will call time on coronavirus policies that have the appearance of being written on the back of a beer mat.