Boris Johnson set to tighten England Covid-19 lockdown

The government is expected to announce new steps to control the spread of coronavirus, with Boris Johnson due to make a TV address on Monday evening and MPs recalled from Wednesday.

The news came amid pressure to increase coronavirus restrictions immediately given soaring infection numbers and hospital admissions, many linked to a new, more easily transmissible variant of the virus.

A Downing Street spokesman said: “The spread of the new variant of Covid-19 has led to rapidly escalating case numbers across the country. The prime minister is clear that further steps must now be taken to arrest this rise and to protect the NHS and save lives. He will set those out this evening.”

Johnson was to update the country on the next steps at 8pm on Monday. The Commons, which had been put into an extended Christmas recess until next week, will now return on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters earlier on Monday, the prime minister had said there was “no question” England would need tough rules, but gave no timetable.

It remains unclear what new measures could be introduced, but one option is expected to be moving areas still under tier 3 rules into tier 4.

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said a national lockdown “in the spirit of March” was now needed with schools closed. He said the government also needed to spell out clearly its plan to defeat the virus through vaccination with a goal of four million vaccines a week by February.

“The virus is out of control. The tier system clearly isn’t working and we all know tougher measures are necessary,” he said.

“If we are asking the British people to be subject to tough national restrictions – and we are because that needs to happen straight away – then the contract needs to be that the vaccine programme is rolled out as quickly as possible, 2 million a week in January and double that in February. That needs to be the deal.

“It needs to be back to the spirit of March. Now you see lots of people out and about, trains that are half full. We need very strong messaging about staying at home.” ”

Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary who now chairs the Commons health committee, had urged immediate action, saying moves to close schools and to ban all household mixing must happen “right away”.

“I know all these things will be under consideration with decisions potentially imminent,” Hunt said in a Twitter thread. “My point is, in the face of exponential growth, even waiting an extra day causes many avoidable deaths so these plans must now be urgently accelerated.”

The new measures would only need to be in place for about 12 weeks, until enough people had been vaccinated against coronavirus, Hunt said, adding: “So there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

He wrote: “To those arguing winter is always like this in the NHS: you are wrong. I faced four serious winter crises as health sec and the situation now is off-the-scale worse than any of those.

“It’s true that we often had to cancel elective care in Jan to protect emergency care but that too is under severe pressure with record trolley waits for the very sickest patients. Even more worryingly fewer heart attack patients appear to be presenting in ICUs, perhaps because they are not dialling 999 when they need to.”

An inundated NHS could also mean more potentially avoidable cancer deaths, as people stayed away from hospitals and GPs, Hunt said: “No 1 lesson is countries that act early & decisively save lives & get their economies back to normal faster.

“We therefore cannot afford to wait: all schools should be closed, international travel stopped, household mixing limited and the tier system reviewed so that the highest tier really does bring down infection levels (as with the first lockdown).”

It was, Hunt added, “our moral duty” to ensure frontline NHS staff were the first to receive the Covid vaccines.