2021 begins: Schools, testing sites and lockdown again

Happy 2021.

It’s over a fortnight - embracing Christmas and the New Year - since I last posted. There’s been a lot since then that I’ve just not had time to write up; on Sunday, 20 December, the French authorities blocked any HGVs and other vehicles crossing the Channel. This lasted for 48 hours, at the end of which vehicles were only able to make the journey if they had secured a negative Covid test. The resulting challenges of traffic management, driver welfare and impact on local communities (especially Dover) were intense and only started to ease around Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I’ll be writing more about transition, so may revert in more detail to those extraordinary days at that point.

The NewYear started with further controversy over whether primary schools should open to the majority of children, or should delay their start for a fortnight. The Department for Education ruled that eight of Kent’s twelve Districts should be considered under the ‘contingency framework’, meaning that general primary opening would be delayed for a fortnight, but that four Districts - Canterbury, Thanet, Dover and Folkestone and Hythe - should not. Neither I nor our public health team could see the rationale for this, and so Richard Long (Cabinet Member for Education and Skills) and I wrote to the Education Secretary, urging that the contingency framework should also be applied to these four Districts. This generated a lot of media interest (including Radio 4’s World at One - interview starts 28 minutes and 30 seconds in) but within a few hours was overtaken entirely by events.

As of last night, Kent - with the rest of the country - found itself in a third national lockdown. The acceleration of infections that we saw in Kent in November and early December, strongly linked to the new strand of the virus, has taken hold nationally. Much of our response reflects the approaches developed in the first and second lockdowns, and I will be returning to this in future posts. You can find our on the day response here.

The Prime Minister’s announcement came at the end of a day in which we had announced the establishment of twelve new asymptomatic testing centres, adding to the two (in Swale and Thanet) that we opened a week before Christmas. This gives testing centres in all of the twelve Districts, and more will be added in the coming weeks, resulting in two in each District. In Sevenoaks, the first centre will be in the Swanley youth club in St Mary’s road, and a further site in the District will be announced shortly. In these new circumstances, we continue to press forward our approach of contact tracing, testing, communication and enforcement, while supporting the NHS in its roll out of vaccination.