Now, Tier 4

Yesterday’s government announcement that Kent, along with London and much of the south east, was due to enter (from midnight last night) a new Tier 4 level of restrictions is a severe blow to the county and its residents just days before Christmas. The County Council will do everything we can to help and support our residents and businesses through this. Our statement is here.

The Tier 4 restrictions reimpose many of the features of the November national restrictions, with a requirement on residents to avoid unnecessary travel and to work from home if at all possible, while ‘non-essential’ retail, leisure centres, personal care facilities (such as hairdressers, nail salons etc) are required to close. This comes on top of the restrictions on the hospitality sector already in place. You can find the details of the restrictions here.

Painfully for many families, Tier 4 status also means that ‘Christmas bubbles’, enabling different households to come together for Christmas, no longer apply. Support bubbles for isolated individuals still do apply, however. 

After the statement from the Prime Minister, I joined a call (along with other local government leaders and chief executives) joined a call with the Communities Secretary, Robert Jenrick, and one of the government’s medical advisers. It was clear from this, as from the earlier press conference, that the new, fast-spreading strain of the virus played a central part in these new decisions. The stubbornly high (and then accelerating again) infection rates in Kent and Medway even amid national and then Tier 3 restrictions resulted in investigations that brought focused attention on the new strain and on its rapid spread throughout the South East. A number of areas in London and Essex now have higher infection rates than the levels seen in Swale, the Kent Borough with the highest rates.

The scientific advice is very clear, and the pressures on hospitals in Kent and Medway are severe: all Kent’s hospital trusts are at or (in most cases) well above the level of Covid admissions seen at the previous peak in April. So the decision is hard to argue with, even if its suddenness and timing is abrupt and even brutal. 

As set out in my previous post, we will continue to focus our efforts on local contact tracing, asymptomatic testing and constantly renewing our approach to communications and enforcement. We will also seek to support residents and businesses through this, and press government to review business support to better assist enterprises and individuals across Kent, with our network of very small firms and self-employment.

Taking the Test

 

This morning Andrew Scott-Clark, KCC’s Director of Public Health and I attended the site (Sheerness Working Men’s Club in Halfway on the Isle of Sheppey) of one of the two asymptomatic testing centres that will start carrying out tests tomorrow. The military planners whose giving us logistical support were present, along with representatives from Swale Borough Council. 

This was a chance to see the centre in operation and to brief and be interviewed by media representatives, including BBC South East and ITV Meridian. Andrew and I took the ‘lateral flow’ Covid test. I did not record exactly how long it took for the result (negative) to come through, but it was about half an hour or just a little longer. The centre staff were very helpful and the process smooth.

For tomorrow, invitations have gone out to key workers and their families, and we expect to then invite the wider local population.

In my interviews, I was asked - unsurprisingly and reasonably- about Kent’s high Covid -19 infection levels, and what can be done to reduce them. I emphasised the actions we are taking with respect to testing, local contact tracing and constant honing of our approach to communications and compliance. The full explanation for Kent’s extraordinary surge in infections, much of it during the period of the second national lockdown, remains unclear, though the emergence of a second, more infectious form of the virus may have played its part. Certainly there has been a recent surge across many parts of the south east, with many areas (such as large parts of our neighbours Essex, Surrey and East Sussex) joining Kent in Tier 3.

Nonetheless, as the Health Secretary pointed out in Parliament today, rates in our county are exceptionally high: “Be really cautious in Kent. It is the area of the country which has the biggest problem.” We are under no illusions as to the scale of the task in turning this round.

Asymptomatic testing: the first sites

Targeted asymptomatic testing is an important part of the efforts by Kent County Council and our partners to contain and ultimately reduce the alarmingly high levels of Covid-19 infections in the County. (This is alongside local contact tracing, communications and enforcement measures). 

Earlier in the month, we secured military logistical support for testing, though we had been in talks on this  for some time prior to entering Tier 3. At the weekend, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) confirmed its support for large-scale asymptomatic testing in Tier 3 areas. KCC has been working with District and Borough Councils and securing sites, and the first two will commence operations this coming Friday, 18 December. They will be in areas of very high infection incidence, in Halfway on the Isle of Sheppey and Ramsgate. People will be invited to take the test by letter or email. 

Further sites will be rolled out in the near future, with the aim to have two sites in each District. Both the priority given to Districts and the location of the sites will be determined by infection levels. 

As is clear from the figures updated daily on KCC’s website, infection levels across the county continue to increase, with all Districts now above the national average and the County as a whole two and a half times that level. Tomorrow’s national announcement about tiering levels will clearly not bring any relief to the County’s Tier 3 status. There is a lot to do to turn this round.

Swanley Village: cleansing the culvert

The culvert in Swanley Village Road, between the junctions with Button Street and Park Lane, been a local problem, with a tendency to be blocked and floodthe surrounding area. It was cleansed in spring 2019, but residents brought to my attention some months ago that it was once more getting blocked. (I had discussed with Kent Highways the best approach to keeping the culvert clean, and it was agreed to do so as and when problems arose).

Tomorrow there will be a road closure while the culvert is cleansed. A civils team will dig out the entrance to the gulley and then the gullies in the area will be cleansed and jetted. The last such operation did give quite a lasting improvement, and hopefully this will do so too.

Preparing for the end of transition

Kent’s geography - its position on the Short Straits crossing to continental Europe - has always meant that the County would be in the front line of the effects of Brexit, and of the end of the UK’s transition out of the EU, the Single Market and Customs Union. The County Council and its partners have long worked to manage that and limit its effects on the County’s residents and businesses.

Yesterday marked a month to the end of transition. We provided a briefing for all County Councillors on the latest preparations; this followed a report to our public Cabinet meeting on Monday. This morning I opened a webinar conference for Kent businesses on the same subject.

All this work details the extensive preparations that we have undertaken, both to secure the continuity of our own services and to prepare - working with our partners in the Kent Resilience Forum, and with national government - traffic management plans to minimise disruption. These work from the government’s ‘Reasonable Worst Case Scenario’ of 7,000 HGVs having to be held within Kent.

Two major conclusions stand out. Firstly, whether or not the UK and EU reach a deal, huge changes are coming to our trade regime with the EU (and with it, a major increase in required paperwork) because of the UK departure from the Single Market. The second is that the degree to which we have to trigger our traffic management plans depends on other factors beyond our control: trader and haulier readiness, and the operation of the systems set up by government to seek to enable trade fluidity. In both areas there have been signs of progress but much is still uncertain. There can be no guarantees of what will happen after 31 December, but in Kent we have worked to do everything possible to ensure that our residents and businesses can continue their daily lives and work with minimum disruption.

There has been a lot of media interest, and yesterday I gave interviews to BBC Radio 4’s PM Programme, (some 47 minutes in) and then as part of a panel discussion on Newsnight (first item, panel discussion about eleven and a half minutes in). In both I emphasised how we are working to protect the interests of Kent, whatever January 2021 may bring.