UK Covid live: over 52,000 cases reported as Boris Johnson says no need to move to ‘plan B’ in England

The government’s Covid dashboard has just been updated, and it shows that there have been 52,009 new coronavirus cases. That is the highest daily total on this measure, and the first time the daily tally has topped 50,000, for more than three months.

Daily new cases were last at this level on 17 July, when 54,674 were recorded.

Some readers have been in touch to say that, even though the government is saying people can book a booster vaccine appointment six months after their second jab without having to wait to be asked (see 10.08am), in practice that is not possible. In the Commons the Lib Dem MP Daisy Cooper made the same point.

Speaking in the Commons, where, bizarrely, the vaccines minister Maggie Throup delivered a statement on Covid despite answering a UQ on the exactly the same topic earlier in the day, Cooper said:

Throup said she would look into this. “If there is a problem with the system, we will get it fixed,” she added.

Boris Johnson has recorded an interview for broadcasters in Northern Ireland. Here are the key points.

Johnson insisted that there was no need for the government to move to ‘plan B’ because Covid cases were not rising beyond expectations. Asked why plan B was not being triggered now, he said:

He also said the position going into the winter was “incomparably better” than it was 12 months ago.

He urged people to get their booster vaccines, saying that was the most important thing people could do.
He said any problems with the booster rollout were caused by people not coming forward, not by a shortage of vaccines. He said:

He would not comment on whether the government is considering shortening the time required between the second dose and the booster vaccine. Jeremy Hunt has proposed this. (See 12.09pm.)
Johnson said that he did not think the Northern Ireland protocol was “coherent with the Belfast/Good Friday agreement” and that it needed to be changed “pretty fast”.
He confirmed that he wanted to stop veterans being put on trial over historic abuses in Northern Ireland. He said he wanted a solution “that brings people together, allows people to grieve, but also allows people to move on”. But he did not say any more about when the government would try to legislate for its highly controversial amnesty plan announced earlier in the year.

Pension funds will be required to set out how their investment strategies support the fight against climate change under new government proposals, PA Media reports. Therese Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, said in a speech that regulations would be amended so trustees have to explain how their investments align with the Paris agreement’s commitment to limit global warming to 1.5C.

Coffey said that with total assets of GBP2tn the UK’s occupational pension schemes had huge power to channel capital into the infrastructure needed to move to net zero emissions. She went on:

Yesterday Sajid Javid, the health secretary, said Tory MPs should be more willing to wear masks. He was responding to a question at his press conference about why most Conservative MPs refuse to wear masks in the Commons chamber, even when the benches are crowded. Javid conceded that the questioner had a point, and he said MPs should be “setting an example as private individuals as well”.

While Conservative MPs have mostly refused to wear masks in the chamber in recent weeks, on the oppostion benches mask wearing is commonplace.

At business questions this morning Pete Wishart, the SNP spokesman, said that behaviour of Tory MPs in this regard was “comic”. He said that four of the 14 Conservatives in the chamber at the time were wearing masks (earlier in the day the proportion was even higher), which he said was more than normal, but he challenged Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Commons leader, to accept that Javid was right.

But Rees-Mogg essentially rejected Javid’s proposal. He told Wishart:

Earlier, when Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow leader of the Commons, raised the same point, Rees-Mogg said that at the Labour party conference people were not wearing masks. He particularly cited the lack of mask wearing at the Daily Mirror conference party, and claimed this was evidence that “masks are worn more by socialists when there are television cameras around than when they are not going to be seen”.

UPDATE: At the morning lobby briefing Downing Street sided with Jacob Rees-Mogg rather than Sajid Javid on this issue. Asked if the PM agreed with Javid about the need for MPs to wear masks in the Commons chamber, the PM’s spokesman said:

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the prime minister’s spokesman said the government’s science advisers have not formally requested a move to the plan B measures in the winter Covid plan.

Asked if Prof Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, or Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, have called for the activation of plan B, the spokesman said:

I was not listening to the briefing today – I’ve taken the quote from PA Media – but it seems the word “formally’ is quite important in that sentence. Government scientists have made no secret of their preference for a precautionary approach (see 9.44am), although Whitty and Vallance have also always been scrupulous in accepting that policy decisions are ultimately a matter for elected politicians, not expert officials.

The spokesman also said the government listened carefully to organisations like the NHS Confederation and the British Medical Association which have both called for the implementation of a plan B. He said: