Interesting read from MEN's Jen Williams. Obvs talking from Manchester's perspective but outlines the issues facing all local councils - and I expect officials on Teesside too,
considering Middlesbrough was also mentioned as an area on high alert for local lockdown:
Hello and welcome to the ‘told you so’ edition of Manchester Memo.
It’s fair to say that after weeks of boring you with largely identical stories about ‘pillar 2’ testing, it’s now officially A Thing.
The localised results of these tests - in short, those carried out at mobile testing labs and drive-throughs - finally started dripping through to councils
last week after
two months of absence. Within days they were underpinning the government’s arguments for Leicester’s local lockdown, announced on Monday.
Without that ‘pillar 2’ data, Leicester didn’t appear to have so much of an issue. Add it in and you’ve got a very different story.
So Leicester is now both a guinea pig and the proof that what local authorities have been warning for weeks was correct.
As we’ve been reporting for quite some time, there are also still huge unanswered questions about how the lockdown of an entire geographic area could work. These are questions that councils - and local and regional media - have asked repeatedly without getting a proper answer, but the gaps in the strategy have only become national news as a result of Leicester.
Back in May, foreign secretary Dominic Raab claimed government had the powers to lock down entire geographies, but this week it turned out that it doesn’t. So it’s now having to pass some more legislation.
Questions also remain over how exactly the police are meant to enforce it, with other forces watching on with keen interest. What happens this weekend, for example, when the pubs reopen - is there anything to stop people, other than adherence to public messaging, from travelling to Loughborough or Nottingham for a pint?
To put it into context, if you locked down Manchester, what’s to stop people wandering down over the river and into Salford? As someone in the town hall said to me weeks ago, you can’t build a fence round the city.
There also doesn’t appear to be a local furlough scheme in place. Neither is there a clear trigger point for Leicester coming out of lockdown. Nor do we know the criteria for Greater Manchester’s boroughs to go into one.
That vacuum of information was filled this week with speculation about the relative situations in some of our boroughs, including the suggestion that they were also at risk of being locked down.
The most egregious example of this was Wigan, which found itself on a list of towns and cities being circulated and reported upon by national media for two days in a row. This appears to have been based on the town having a large percentage increase in cases - but that was because the previous week, it had had none at all. So inevitably the rise looked big.
Whether that came from a political adviser briefing out stuff irresponsibly is unclear, although Andy Burnham seems to think it did and it seems a logical bet. If so, the person responsible might want to book themselves onto a stats course pronto.
Either way, Wigan’s public health director then
had to put out a message to local people insisting that the borough’s infection rates are in fact currently very low - 4 per 100,000, compared to Leicester’s 135 - and calling the reports ‘misleading, unhelpful and irresponsible’.
Rochdale and Oldham have also featured on lists of places reported widely in the same context this week, but again, the reality is different. While both boroughs did have comparatively high infection rates in the week to June 21, they have since fallen and have not been anywhere near those in Leicester.
Frustrated at the reports, Greater Manchester decided on Wednesday simply
to publish its bang up-to-date borough-by-borough rates in order to quell speculation.
We are a ‘long, long way from lockdown’, insisted the mayor - albeit with the caveat that still nobody actually knows what the government is using as its criteria. Local leaders are hoping desperately that by being on the front foot in terms of local planning, infection control and contact tracing, they can avoid a Leicester situation.
Behind closed doors, other Covid dramas are playing out. Manchester councillors are getting increasingly grumpy about what they see as a lack of transparency around decision-making during the pandemic -
here’s my piece from Monday on why.
And
here is my piece on the plight facing homeless families during the lockdown proper, which charities fear has been having a toxic effect on vulnerable children and parents.
Please do also read
this from my colleague Tom George on the administration of Wigan Athletic, another of those lower league clubs whose demise would be catastrophic for the towns and communities that hold them dear.
And here is my colleague Emily Heward on
the Royal Exchange theatre’s announcement of mass lay-offs yesterday. There are now serious fears about the future of a range of Manchester cultural institutions, with no clear answer as to how they will be saved.
Another reason for leaders here to pray that as the economy does start to reopen, we don’t then have to follow in Leicester’s footsteps.