UK coronavirus live: test and trace gets under way in England and Scotland

Brian Strutton, general secretary of the pilots’ union Balpa said:

EasyJet staff will be shocked at the scale of this announcement. Only two days ago staff got a ‘good news’ message from their boss with no mention of job losses so this is a real kick in the teeth.

Those staff have taken pay cuts to keep the airline afloat and this is the treatment they get in return.

EasyJet has not discussed its plans with Balpa so we will wait and see what impact there will be in the UK.

But given EasyJet is a British company, the UK is it’s strongest market and it has had hundreds of millions in support from the UK taxpayer I can safely say that we will need a lot of convincing that EasyJet needs to make such dramatic cuts.

Indeed, EasyJet’sown projections, though on the pessimistic side, point to recovery by 2023 so this is a temporary problem that doesn’t need this ill-considered knee-jerk reaction.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said tracers will make a “clinical judgment” on who should self-isolate “with the best aim to be to find the people who you’ve been in contact with under two metres for 15 minutes”.

Hancock told BBC Breakfast: “Our goal is that we have the turnaround of the test within 24 hours. We’ve now managed to get the system so that 84% of the tests that you take at a drive-through centre are turned around within 24 hours and the Prime Minister yesterday set us the goal of having every test turned around within 24 hours.”

On when the timeframe starts, Hancock said “the time that really matters is the time from the moment you have symptoms and call up”.

He added: “From that moment until we can get the positive result back if that is what it is, if it is positive, and get going on the contact tracing – it is that end-to-end time that matters.”

Hancock said he is “confident” that results can be received “faster” than an academic study which suggested it would take three days.

Thousands of easyJet staff are to lose their jobs under plans announced by the airline.

The Luton-based carrier said it intends to reduce its workforce by up to 30% as it reduces the size of its fleet due to the coronavirus pandemic.

This follows similar moves by other airlines such as British Airways and Ryanair.

EasyJet has around 15,000 full-time employees, meaning a maximum of 4,500 jobs are at risk.

The low-cost airline’s chief executive Johan Lundgren said:

We realise that these are very difficult times and we are having to consider very difficult decisions which will impact our people, but we want to protect as many jobs as we can for the long term.

We remain focused on doing what is right for the company and its long-term health and success, following the swift action we have taken over the last three months to meet the challenges of the virus.

Although we will restart flying on 15 June, we expect demand to build slowly, only returning to 2019 levels in about three years’ time.

Against this backdrop, we are planning to reduce the size of our fleet and to optimise the network and our bases.

EasyJet announced that by the end of next year it expects to have reduced its fleet size by around 51 aircraft to approximately 302.
This will be achieved through measures such as deferring new aircraft arrivals.

Bookings for winter are “well ahead of the equivalent point last year”, partly due to some customers rebooking flights which were cancelled due to the pandemic.

The governor of the Bank of England has warned Britain’s economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis will be tougher than expected, saying a fresh wave of money creation methods will be needed.

Andrew Bailey has shied away from idea of cutting official interest rates to below zero for the first time in the Bank’s 326-year history.

Instead, he says more economic support is likely to come in the form of quantitative easing (QE) – in which the Bank buys government bonds from investors, pumping money into the economy in the process.

Since the crisis began in March, the Bank has cut official interest rates to 0.1%, announced a 200 billion expansion of QE, made moves to ease the financial pressure on large companies and made it easier for banks to lend.

Bailey is wary, however, of going further by taking interest rates negative.

“We have signalled that we stand ready to do more within the framework of policies we have used to date,” he wrote in The Guardian.

“And, in view of the risks we face, it is of course right that we consider what further options, such as cutting interest rates into unprecedented territory, might be available in the future. But it is also important that we consider very carefully the issues that such choices would give rise to.”

Despite support measures already taken, official figures released on Wednesday showed the Government was paying the wages of 8.4 million employees, out of a total labour force of 32 million.

A new report by a UK charity has highlighted the plight of the world’s most vulnerable communities amid the coronavirus pandemic, calling it a crisis from which many people will never recover.

After studying 13 countries in Africa and Asia, the charity Street Child said one third of people surveyed were unable to take the most basic measures to guard against Covid-19, including washing their hands.

More than half of the children in the survey have been unable to take part in learning activities during the pandemic, the group said, while more than half of people surveyed were fearful of hunger and starvation due to rising food prices and their loss of income.

Street Child’s chief executive Tom Dannatt said in a statement the results of the survey “clearly demonstrate Covid-19 is having a devastating impact on the world’s most vulnerable communities”.

“With schools closed, a lack of access to basic prevention measures such as soap and water, and a very real risk of extreme hunger and even starvation, children and families are in the midst of a crisis that many will never recover from,” he said.

Nicola Sturgeon is expected to announce “cautious” steps out of lockdown for Scotland. The First Minister will reveal on Thursday if the country is moving on to the first phase of a four-part plan for easing the restrictions – which were put in place more than nine weeks ago on March 23.

Dozens of travel companies have called on the home secretary to scrap plans to impose a mandatory 14-day quarantine on people arriving in the UK due to the coronavirus.

Accusing the government of being “woefully slow” in its support for the travel industry, more than 70 company heads have co-signed a letter to Priti Patel over her announcement last week surrounding the new measure for arrivals, which starts on June 8.

Signatories have urged the government to switch from protection mode in the face of the Covid-19 crisis to economic recovery.

“The very last thing the travel industry needs,” the letter says, “is a mandatory quarantine imposed on all arriving passengers which will deter foreign visitors from coming here, deter UK visitors from travelling abroad and, most likely, cause other countries to impose reciprocal quarantine requirements on British visitors, as France has already announced. “

Health secretary Matt Hancock said that people will have to self-isolate for 14 days on more than one occasion if told to do so by the NHS.

“Employment law covers this and we changed the law a couple of months ago so that if you are instructed by the NHS for public health reasons to stay at home, then that is the equivalent in employment law to being ill, and it is very important that employers are flexible around this.”

Asked how quickly test results will be received back, Hancock said: “84% of the tests from the drive-through centres are returned within 24 hours, 95% of all tests are returned within 48 hours.

“Of course, there are examples of where the process hasn’t worked, because this is now a massive process, so there are individual stray examples. We’re working all the time to make it faster, I want to see every test returned within 24 hours from those drive-through centres and we will do that just as quickly as we can.”

Hancock added that he is “sure” chief medical officer Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance “will be at the podium soon”.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said he believes “the vast majority of people” will self-isolate voluntarily under the new NHS Test and Trace system.

Asked what people should do if they have childcare issues but are told to self-isolate, Hancock told Sky News: “Well, of course, it is very important that childcare is taken into account. I understand that as well as anybody, so yes it is very important that people deal with childcare and do that in a reasonable way.”

Pushed on whether you would still need to stay at home, he added: “That is what you will be instructed to do, yes, and you should follow those instructions because that is in the best interest of everybody.”

Asked how the system could be made mandatory in future, Mr Hancock said: “There are powers that we took through Parliament at the start of the crisis in the Coronavirus Act to be able to mandate this but I’d far rather not….”

He added that it would be “far better if we didn’t have to make it mandatory”.

EasyJet plans to reduce its workforce by up to 30% to enable a “restructure of our business” due to the coronavirus pandemic, the airline said.

Chief executive Johan Lundgren said: “We realise that these are very difficult times and we are having to consider very difficult decisions which will impact our people, but we want to protect as many jobs as we can for the long-term.

“We remain focused on doing what is right for the company and its long-term health and success, following the swift action we have taken over the last three months to meet the challenges of the virus.

“Although we will restart flying on June 15, we expect demand to build slowly, only returning to 2019 levels in about three years’ time.

“Against this backdrop, we are planning to reduce the size of our fleet and to optimise the network and our bases.