Downing Street’s flagship policy for tackling the coronavirus in England has descended into chaos after mayors and MPs from the north-west of the country emphatically rejected being moved into the highest lockdown level and accused ministers of treating the region with contempt.
Talks designed to broker an agreement ended with bitter and angry exchanges, deepening a north-south rift that has left the government’s strategy of tiered restrictions in turmoil.
While ministers could still unilaterally impose a lockdown, they believe local leaders’ cooperation is crucial in communicating and enforcing the restrictions.
The mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, said he would not accept his area being treated “as canaries in the coalmine for an experimental regional lockdown strategy”, one he said even the government’s own medical advisers did not think would work.
Burnham was backed by exasperated MPs from Greater Manchester, and from Lancashire, the other area set to join the Liverpool city region in the “very high-risk” tier 3 category, which entails the closure of pubs and bars.
This included a number of Conservatives. One said of negotiating with the government: “You might as well talk to a wall.” Another Labour MP described the talks as a “shitshow”.
The Guardian has been told the Treasury is now urgently weighing up the possibility of offering more support to regions facing new restrictions, one of the major demands of Burnham and his allies.
But this is expected to focus on supporting businesses in the less restrictive tier 2 areas. As of Saturday, this will include London – where infection rates are understood to be doubling every week to 10 days – as well as areas including Essex, York and parts of Derbyshire. The extra curbs mean that more than half of England’s population will be living under high or very high alert restrictions.
Burnham is demanding that businesses forced to close in tier 3 areas receive an 80% subsidy to pay staff, equivalent to the original furlough job protection scheme.
Ministers have made clear they will not budge, and were expected to discuss on Thursday evening whether to use their powers to impose tier 3 restrictions on Greater Manchester and Lancashire in the teeth of local leaders’ opposition.
With the UK recording another 19,724 positive cases and 138 deaths on Thursday, one Whitehall official said there were concerns that any further delay would be risky.
They said: “The rules are pretty clear on the powers of us versus the mayors on this. Purely from a public health perspective, we’re at or approaching exponential growth rates and every day or every hour matters here.”
Burnham, a Labour former health secretary, has become a figurehead for regional opposition to the new restrictions in the absence of extra support.
[Clarification inserted 16 October 2020: the map above shows the whole ceremonial county of Essex under tier 2 restrictions; in fact, the unitary authorities of Thurrock and Southend-on-Sea stayed in tier 1 at time of publication.]
In a defiant speech on the steps of Manchester central library on Thursday afternoon, the mayor claimed England’s deputy medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, had told him the previous evening that “the only certain thing to work is a national lockdown”.
Burnham said he was in favour of a so-called circuit breaker national lockdown because this would be fairer, but ministers had refused to countenance such a move.
“The government told us this morning it is unwilling to do that because of damage it will do to the national economy, and yet that is what it wants to impose on the north-west,” he said.
He said the region would not be “the sacrificial lamb for an ill-thought-through Downing Street policy which doesn’t make sense in the real world”.
Burnham added: “They are asking us to gamble our residents’ jobs, homes and businesses and a large chunk of our economy on a strategy that their own experts tell them might not work.”
In a hastily arranged TV clip, Matt Hancock hit back by accusing Burnham and his allies of being too partisan. “I call upon local leaders to set aside this party politics and to work with us to put in place the measures that are needed,” he said.
Asked whether more financial support could come, the health secretary indicated not: “There has been an unprecedented package of support that’s been put forward.”
The tone for an often bad-tempered day was set early, when junior health ministers briefed north-west England MPs in conference calls, with the care minister Helen Whately talking to those from Greater Manchester.
A Labour MP on that call was unimpressed: “Shitshow doesn’t even begin to summarise that meeting … We let the Tory MPs go first and they piled into her saying: what’s the point of this meeting if you are just going to brief to the media that you’ve already made a decision?”
The deadlock meant that when Hancock made a Commons statement shortly before lunchtime, he was only able to announce the move into tier 2, under which indoor household mixing is banned, for London, as well as Essex, a district of Surrey, Barrow-in-Furness, York, north-east Derbyshire, and two other parts of Derbyshire: Erewash and Chesterfield.
Hancock said negotiations were continuing for Greater Manchester and Lancashire.
The statement received a hostile response from both Conservative and Labour MPs, with Lucy Powell, the Labour MP for Manchester Central, saying there was “unanimous fury” locally about the government’s actions.
Lancashire is also holding out against being put into tier 3. The county has some of the highest infection rates in England, with Burnley now the third-worst affected local authority, after Nottingham and Knowsley in Merseyside, with 554.4 cases for every 100,000 people.
Matthew Brown, the Labour leader of Preston council, said both Conservatives and Labour leaders in the county agreed that the support package had to be much better if they were going to consent to tier 3, not just for furloughed workers and businesses forced to close, but also in terms of resources for local test and trace.
Rishi Sunak is understood to be looking at support for businesses in tier 2 areas that will see a potentially ruinous drop in income but are not formally obliged to close, and so are not currently eligible for wage subsidies and business grants.
The chancellor has no immediate plans to make the Treasury support packages more generous, in part because of concerns about the government’s spiralling borrowing, but is keeping the need for further action under review.