Schools in Leicester were taking a pragmatic approach to orders to close. The Lionheart academies trust, which includes 12 primary and secondary schools in and around the affected area, closed all of them from Tuesday, ahead of the government’s Thursday deadline.

“We made a decision last night we were going to close them today,” a spokesman said. “It made more sense from a safety perspective. We have to do what’s safe for students, staff, parents and carers.

We emailed our parents to let them know and staff were on site for people who were not able to make arrangements. We’ve been in lockdown for so long, I think there’s a new pragmatism that people have. They see this as something that’s important.

The Leicester outbreak and news of an “unusually high” incidence of coronavirus among children there, prompted fresh warnings from teachers’ leaders who later this week will be given detailed government guidance on full school reopening in England in September.

According to Nottinghamshire Live, the chief constable of Nottinghamshire police, Craig Guildford, has said that if his force finds people travelling from Leicester into his county to avoid the lockdown, particularly in coaches or minibuses, they will be turned back.

Downing Street has updated its daily dashboard with the latest coronavirus figures. These are UK figures. Here is the graph showing the number of daily deaths. It is still going down, but now the rate of decline is flattening.

And here is the chart showing the number of admissions to hospital.

Several readers got in touch yesterday to ask why this chart only contains data up until 16 June. On Friday last week, when No 10 published the last of its daily slides containing this information, the hospital admissions data went up to 23 June. I’ve asked No 10 for an explanation, but have not had a response yet. The small print of the website says that this chart is now being updated weekly, because that is when Scotland updates its hospital admission figures, but that does not explain why more up-to-date figures were available last week.

This chart is important because, if there is a second spike in coronavirus cases, the first really clear evidence of that may turn up here.

UPDATE: No 10 says the slide published on Friday may have appeared more up-to-date, but it did not include the Scottish data.

The shadow justice secretary, David Lammy, has warned the government not to take the black, Asian and ethnic minority community “for fools” in a row over his 2017 review into young people in the criminal justice system.

Lammy said Boris Johnson inadvertently misled MPs when he claimed that all 16 recommendations of his independent report had been implemented.

In an urgent question in the Commons he asked the government to be clearer on the measures they had taken on such an important matter. More than half (51%) of all under-18s in young offender institutions are from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds – an increase of 10% since his report was released three years ago.

Justice minister Alex Chalk said that the government and Labour had agreed to implement 11 of the 16 recommendations but a dispute remains over five of them.

Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said the prime minister should have personally appeared in the chamber to explain he had been wrong. He said:

Change will only happen when you tell the truth. Do not take the community involved for fools.

One of the disputed recommendations is providing full transcripts of sentencing hearings. Chalk said the costs would have been prohibitive but they had acted by providing a guide to help people understand the court process. “We implemented the spirit of it,” he said, adding that they had flexibility when they could not follow a recommendation to the letter.

Opposition parties have accused Boris Johnson of concealing a cut in funding for affordable housing in his speech. The budget proposed £12bn over affordable housing over five years, but No 10 now says that will come over eight years. HuffPost’s Paul Waugh has the details.

Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow housing minister, said: “A real terms cut in funding for affordable housing shows where the Tories’ priorities really lie: slashing planning regulations for their wealthy developer backers, not building good quality, environmentally sustainable and truly affordable housing for workers.”

But, according to the Mirror’s Mikey Smith, the government claims there is an innocent explanation.

As part of the government’s spending programme, Robert Buckland, the justice secretary, has announced new funding for the courts amounting to £142m for technology modernisation and repairs to the crumbling court houses and tribunals.

The money, according to the MoJ, is in addition to the existing £1bn modernisation project that has been running for several years. In terms of refurbishments, it is said to be “the biggest single investment in maintenance of the court estate for over 20 years”.

That claim should be set against evidence given by the Ministry of Justice’s permanent secretary, Sir Richard Heathon, to the public accounts committee earlier this week when he admitted that previous Treasury settlements had imposed “ambitious and unrealistic” savings targets. The MoJ has suffered the deepest cuts to its finances of any Whitehall department since 2010.

The lord chief justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon, has repeatedly called for extra funds because of the decrepit state of many of the courts. In May, he told MPs the administration of justice has been “underfunded for years and years and the consequences are coming home to roost”.

Announcing the new funding, Buckland, said:

Over 100 courts will see improvements as part of the extra investment, with at least 2,250 jobs created in the process nationwide. A further £30m will be spent to give 750 more courtrooms the ability to hold remote hearings within six months. Around £10m extra will be spent building new court facilities and £95m on maintenance this year, on top of the £48m already planned.

This includes courts such as Wrexham, Hull, and Leeds, which will benefit from new court cells, court rooms, and improved accessibility as part of this investment. Maintenance at over 100 courts will see buildings across the country refurbished and become more energy efficient.

I’ve already quoted the Theresa May/Michael Gove exchange from the Commons earlier, where May criticised Boris Johnson’s decision to appoint David Frost as the new national security adviser (see 1.43pm), but if you want to appreciate the full force of May’s anger, you need to watch the video. As PM she became famous for her “death stare”. It was in action again this afternoon ...

The Institute for Public Policy Research, a leftwing thinktank based in London, said the planning and housing plans “fall woefully short” of what is needed.

Jonathan Webb, an IPPR research fellow, said:

The prime minister’s announcements fall woefully short of what’s needed. It does seem deeply ironic that the £12bn re-announced today, as part of speech billed as ‘build, build, build’, actually represents a cut in the support for the delivery of affordable homes, with the funding now being spread over eight years rather than five years.

Loosening planning restrictions so that more commercial properties can be converted to residential homes puts the future delivery of affordable homes at risk and will accelerate the hollowing out of communities and the decline of the high street. A proper blueprint for town centres is needed.

Amongst these proposals, there is not enough focus on ensuring that new homes are genuinely affordable. Too many people are being pushed into accommodation they simply cannot afford. At the sharp end of this crisis, we have seen an unacceptable rise in homelessness and rough sleeping.

The Welsh health minister said Boris Johnson’s apparent spending spree will not lead to a “single penny” of new investment for the country.

Vaughan Gething said the prime minister’s “new deal” was nothing more than recycling money found by “looking down the back of departmental sofas”.

Gething told the Welsh government’s daily press briefing in Cardiff:

It’s a classic challenge of unpicking the rhetoric from the reality.

I know he’s been presenting it as a ‘new deal’, (but) it’s not so much new deal as no deal.

If you look at what’s actually happening from his announcement today, we don’t understand there was a single penny of new investment for Wales.

It’s recycling money already announced, and it’s simply looking down the back of departmental sofas to repackage that money. That isn’t a new deal.

I think at a time when all of us in ministerial office have had to think about how we behave and how we conduct ourselves this time around unprecedented international crisis, the trust in what we say really matters.

And these are from Peter Apps, deputy editor at Inside Housing. He says that Boris Johnson’s argument in his speech that “newt-counting” planning restrictions are to blame for the slow pace of house building in the UK (see 11.32am) is a myth.

Here are some tweets from journalists on the Boris Johnson speech.

From the New Statesman’s George Eaton

From the Telegraph’s Louis Ashworth

From Newsnight’s Lewis Goodall

From my colleague Peter Walker

Speaking after a phone call with the prime minister, the Leicester mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby, told reporters:

I told him it would actually be enormously helpful to have, amongst the data that was collected as part of the testing process, the ethnicity of the people that were tested and where it is available, and where it is appropriate, their place of work.

I think he took that point. Certainly in a city like Leicester, it’s important to know whether it’s particular neighbourhoods or communities being affected.

Knowing the address is important, knowing the ethnicity is certainly something that may give you a clue as to how the spread has taken place, and if there is a place of work ... those pieces of information help us to pinpoint where the issues might be.

When asked if Johnson had apologised to him over the nationally-run system that had “let Leicester down”, Soulsby said:

I didn’t press him for anything of that sort.

What I wanted to do was take the opportunity to make sure that the data we get is something that can be very useful at a local level.

I made those very limited points and he seems to have taken them on board.

Students applying to study at the University of Oxford later this year will be interviewed online - rather than in person - because of Covid restrictions, the university has announced.

Under normal circumstances, around 10,000 applicants from the UK and all over the world visit Oxford over a two-week period in December in order to attend an interview, which is seen as a crucial part of the university’s admissions process.

This year however all interviews will be done remotely.

The university said in a statement.

It is in light of the ongoing concerns with the global Covid-19 pandemic and our priority to protect the wellbeing of our applicants, students, staff and the wider community, that we have taken the decision to move to online admissions interviews in December 2020

Interviews are a key part of forming a nuanced understanding of a student’s potential to flourish at Oxford and online interviews are already used with applicants for whom it is difficult to travel to Oxford.

We are mindful though that extra support might be needed for some students and are working hard to put this in place, but we are confident that this move will allow us to continue to recruit talented students from all backgrounds.

In his speech Boris Johnson promised “the most radical reforms to our planning system” since the second world war.

Here is the No 10 news release about the plans, which are intended to make it easier to change the use of a building and to build a home in a vacant or redundant building.

And here are some of the details from the news release.

More types of commercial premises having total flexibility to be repurposed through reform of the use classes order. A building used for retail, for instance, would be able to be permanently used as a café or office without requiring a planning application and local authority approval. Pubs, libraries, village shops and other types of uses essential to the lifeblood of communities will not be covered by these flexibilities.

A wider range of commercial buildings will be allowed to change to residential use without the need for a planning application.

Builders will no longer need a normal planning application to demolish and rebuild vacant and redundant residential and commercial buildings if they are rebuilt as homes.

Property owners will be able to build additional space above their properties via a fast track approval process, subject to neighbour consultation.

Quite how radical these changes will turn out to be remains to be seen. There is a long history of governments announcing radical changes to planning laws. The last set came in 2017.

As my colleague Patrick Wintour points, these proposals often never get followed through properly - partly because the housing minister tends to get replaced every year.

Here is the full text of Boris Johnson’s speech.

Two trainers have decided to withdraw their horses from Tuesday’s race meeting at Leicester, taking the view that the sport’s ruling body has made a mistake in allowing the fixture to proceed.

The British Horseracing Authority announced at 11.19am that, despite the local lockdown to combat a spike in coronavirus cases, racing would go ahead at the Oadby venue, just outside the city.

Graeme McPherson, who works as a QC as well as a racehorse trainer and has presented cases for the BHA, said:

I thought it was a real kick in the teeth to the people of Leicester, to say you can’t open your businesses, you can’t go out of your houses because the government say you shouldn’t travel except for essential reasons, and for the BHA then to say that, well, the local authority says we can go ahead with racing so we will.

McPherson took out his only entrant at Leicester, Homing Star in the 8.15pm race. He added:

It seems to me that racing ought to be setting an example. Regardless of whether or not racing could go ahead, racing ought to be saying we won’t go ahead if every other business in Leicester cannot reopen.

Here’s a write-up by Simon Murphy and Kate Proctor on the local lockdown in Leicester, and the critics who accuse the government of sowing confusion.

They report:

Enforcing an extension to the Leicester lockdown will mean changes to the law, Hancock said on Monday morning. But Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth, whose constituency is Leicester South, urged him to hold a press conference to answer questions on the lockdown.

“The government’s response to the situation in Leicester has left people anxious and confused,” the shadow health secretary said. “We support the government’s decision to reintroduce lockdown restrictions. However, there are a number of outstanding questions about how the government intends to implement these restrictions and get the outbreak back under control.”

Leicester’s director of public health, Dr Ivan Browne, has said the city will experience an “intensification” of the public health messaging around coronavirus restrictions, PA Media reports.

He said people in the city should continue adhering to the 2-metre rule, washing their hands regularly and wearing face coverings in public places, while some restrictions are lifted elsewhere in the UK.

Speaking at a press conference in Leicester, he added:

Now that we are getting postcode data, that’s been hugely helpful for us, my team have crunched that data and we are now getting to that point where we are down to local areas, so that means we can have a real good attempt to try and make sure we are tailoring our messages and we are providing the testing resources that are needed.

We have good engagement nationally to pick up testing requirements, it’s much easier now than it was, we can make that call now for additional testing resources, which you will start to see appearing across the city.”

We’re asking the people of Leicester to continue and to push harder. We recognise that it is an impact on their lives, but from a public health point of view we really want to do everything that we can to reduce the numbers that we’re seeing.

Neil O’Brien, Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby & Wigston on the outskirts of Leicester, said the new lockdown was “very disruptive and everyone wishes it wasn’t happening” but welcomed the measures to help slow the area’s outbreak.

When asked whether he thought people would stick to the rules as other areas open up, O’Brien told the PA Media:

I think that people in Leicester and Leicestershire have got good common sense, they have been told that there is a deadly virus in danger of taking off in the city and I think that people will respect that and respond to it.

On why the area was experiencing high levels of cases, O’Brien said:

I haven’t seen a clear or definitive explanation for why Leicester is as badly affected as it is, there are probably a lot of different factors in play. We will be trying to get to the bottom of it obviously.

Leicester like a lot of other places that have had severe outbreaks has a lot of multi-generational households.

That creates a risk because you have older vulnerable people living with working people so we need to take extra care in Leicester and Leicestershire.

Sir Peter Soulsby, the mayor of Leicester, said the local lockdown announced last night “was I think more wide-ranging than we’d anticipated”.

He told reporters:

I’m really grateful for that, because while it is a pain for us and a nuisance for us in the city to be subject to that level of restriction and to have the clock turned back in the development of the virus, it is nonetheless something that has some realistic prospect of being effective.”

I’ve had lots of speculation and lots of questions about where it is in the community and we have not as yet been able to give satisfactory answers even to ourselves, no matter anybody else, about which parts of the community need the intervention.

Which neighbourhoods, which communities, indeed which streets.

If you live in Leicester, we’d like to hear what you think about the local lockdown. You can tell us how you’ve been affected by filling in our form or getting in touch via WhatsApp by clicking here or adding the contact +44(0)7867825056.

The Leicester outbreak and news that there has been an “unusually high” incidence of coronavirus among children there necessitating school closures, has prompted fresh warnings from teachers’ leaders, who later this week will be given detailed government guidance on full school reopening in England in September.

Dr Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT teachers’ union, said:

This will be a very unsettling time for the people of Leicester and those who have been affected by the spread of the coronavirus, but it is essential that swift and appropriate measures are put into place to protect public health.

With the government’s confirmation that its decision to close schools in Leicester has been influenced by evidence of increasing numbers of children testing positive for coronavirus, it is critically important that the government, working with local authorities, acts to ensure the safety of all children, their teachers and the general public.

Decisions on whether schools and colleges should remain open or closed during this pandemic must be driven at every stage by public health interests and the need to safeguard the health and safety of pupils and their teachers. It is of paramount importance that the government and employers take the decisions necessary in order to protect public health.

Here is my colleague Heather Stewart’s snap story on the Boris Johnson speech.

And this is how it starts.

Boris Johnson has promised to act fast to boost spending on infrastructure in the face of the looming recession, as he returned to his manifesto pledge of “levelling up” the UK in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis.

Delivering a major speech in Dudley College of Technology, at a podium emblazoned with the slogan “build, build, build”, the prime minister claimed his government would tackle the long-term problems in the UK economy revealed by the “lightning flash” of the pandemic.

Acknowledging the scale of the oncoming downturn, he said: “We must work fast, because we’ve already seen the vertiginous drop in GDP, and we know that people are worried about their jobs and their businesses.

“And we’re waiting as if between the flash of lightning and the thunderclap, with our hearts in our mouths, for the full economic reverberations to appear.”

I will be posting more from the speech and the Q&A, and reaction and analysis, shortly.

Q: The West Midlands needs another £3bn. Will it get it?

Johnson says the West Midlands will get a huge sum. He says he would be surprised if it were not “well north of £3bn”.

He says he is a glass half-full person. He thinks we wil get through this, and get through it well. The opportunity is massive, he says.

Q: On public spending are you now more Gordon Brown than Margaret Thatcher?

Johnson says journalists should wait and see for what Rishi Sunak says. He says his instincts are to cut taxes where possible. But we have a generational challenge.

He says, on top of the bedrock of infrastructure, you need dynamic private sector companies.

He says that requires “a competitive approach to taxation”.

Q: And are nimbies (“not in my back yard” people - the anti-planning crowd) going to get it now?

Johnson says there are always people who object to things. If it were up to the Treasury, the M25 would never have been built, he says.

Q: Is what is happening in Hong Kong going to affect policy on Huawei?

Johnson says Dominic Raab has already commented on this.

On Huawei, he says he won’t be drawn into Sinophobia, because he is not a Sinophobe. But he does want to see critical infrastructure protected from hostile vendors.

Q: How confident are you that you will be able to keep unemployment below the 3m level it hit in the 1980s?

Johnson says “we face a real, real crisis”. But he is going to address it properly.

He says the government will work as hard as possible to address this, as it did with the furlough scheme.

He says he cannot promise what the outcome will be.

He remembers the crisis of 2008. It was not as bad as this crisis. The government tackled it then. It had huge infrastructure projects, like CrossRail and the Olympic Park, and the government just kept at it.

Q: But this sort of investment takes a long time to get going. The people losing jobs are in retail or hospitality. How can you give them the skills to find work?

Johnson says he is giving them the opportunity guarantee. And he is also not going to despair of the chance of getting back to normal.

He says a world where people have to stay apart is not going to work in the long term.

So we have to get the disease down, and return to normal life as soon as possible, he says.

Q: You promised a world-class test, trace and isolate scheme. But you are shutting down a city of 500,000 people and we don’t have a world-class test and trace system.

Johnson says he always said he would have to address local outbreaks.

On testing, he says there are testing almost twice as much as other European countries.

Johnson is now winding up.

But as we approach 4 July I am afraid that the dangers have not gone away.

The virus is out there still circling like a shark in the water and it will take all our collective discipline and resolve to keep that virus at bay.

And if we can do that then we can get on all the faster to the next phase and to the delivery of our plan for recovery.

This is a government that is wholly committed not just to defeating coronavirus but to using this crisis finally to tackle this country’s great unresolved challenges of the last three decades.

Johnson says he has not turned communist.

My friends, I am not a communist.

I believe it is also the job of government to create the conditions for free market enterprise and yes we clap for our NHS, but under this government we also clap for those who make our NHS possible our innovators, our wealth creators, our capitalists and financiers.

Johnson compares his new deal to Franklin D Roosevelt’s.

I am conscious as I say all this that it sounds like a prodigious amount of government intervention.

It sounds positively Rooseveltian. It sounds like a New Deal.

And all I can say is that if so, then that is how it is meant to sound and to be, because that is what the times demand a government that is powerful and determined and that puts its arms around people at a time of crisis, that tackles homelessness and the inequalities that drive people to food banks because it is time not just for a new deal but a fair deal for the British people.

And we can do all this partly because of the prudent management of the economy in the last 10 years but also because we are planning to invest now when the cost of borrowing allows it, when the returns are greatest, because that is the way both now and in the medium term to drive the growth, and fuel the animal spirits and the long-term business investment on which our future prosperity depends.

Turning to the union of the UK, Johnson says tackling coronavirus has been a partnership.

It was the might of the UK Treasury that set up that furlough scheme – in all corners of the country and sent massive and immediate extra funding to all four parts of the UK.

He says the government will review transport links between the four nations.

We will carry out a study of all future road, rail, air and cross-sea links between our four parts of the UK.

When did a government first promise to dual the A1 to Scotland? It was 1992.

Well this government is going to do it.

Johnson says the goverment will continue with its NHS funding programme - the biggest ever, he claims.

He says he will reform social care.

We will end the injustice that some people have to sell their homes to finance the costs of their care while others do not. We are finalising our plans and we will build a cross-party consensus.

He will invest in education, he says.

There will be a 10-year school building programme, he says, starting with a £1bn investment.

He will hire 20,000 more police officers.

And he will invest in infrastructure.

We have learned the wonders of Zoom and MS Teams, the joys of muting or unmuting our colleagues, but we still need to travel and the time has come when we must unite and level up in the most basic way possible - not just with HS2 and NPR but with better roads, better rail, unblocking the central Manchester bottleneck that delays services across the north and 4,000 brand new zero-carbon buses and a massive new plan for cycleways and we will build and rebuild those vital connexions to every part of the UK.

Johnson says levelling up does not mean being anti-business.

When I say level up, I don’t mean attacking our great companies or impeding the success of London – far from it - or launching some punitive raid on the wealth creators.

I don’t believe in tearing people down any more than I believe in tearing down statues that are part of our heritage.

Johnson says there is a “yawning gap” between the most and least productive parts of the country.

That is why the government needs to level up, he says.

Yet too many parts of this country have felt left behind neglected, unloved, as though someone had taken a strategic decision that their fate did not matter as much as the metropolis.

And so I want you to know that this government not only has a vision to change this country for the better we have a mission to unite and level up.

Johnson says the chancellor will next week announce plans to support the economy through the recovery.

He says he will “double down on levelling up”.

Johnson says the government must now act quickly to address the economic slump.

We must work fast because we have already seen the vertiginous drop in GDP and we know that people are worried about their jobs and their businesses and we are waiting as if between the flash of lightning and the thunderclap with our hearts in our mouths for the full economic reverberations to appear.

We must use this moment – now – this interval to plan our response and to fix of course the problems that were most brutally illuminated in that Covid lightning flash.

Johnson says the UK will have to learn lessons from the government’s handling of the crisis.

I know that there are plenty of things that people say and will say that we got wrong and we owe that discussion and that honesty to the many tens of thousands who have died before their time, to the families who have lost loved ones and of course there must be time to learn the lessons, and we will.

But some things went right, he says.

But I also know that some things went right – emphatically right. I think of the speed and efficiency with which we put up the Nightingales – 10 days for a hospital – I think of the drive and inventiveness of the British companies who rose to the ventilator challenge with three brand new production lines called into being within the space of eight weeks with a new model of ventilator developed in March and granted regulatory approval in weeks, and 9,500 of them now made.

I pay tribute to the pace at which Oxford University managed to perform the trials for dexamethasone, the world’s first demonstrably life-saving treatment for the disease.

I am in awe of the problem-crunching fury with which HMRC and the Treasury created the furlough scheme and all the other means of support world-leading standards of protection for jobs and incomes in a matter of days.

And he says there was one big reason why the NHS was not overwhelmed.

There was one big reason in the end that we were able to avert a far worse disaster and that was because the whole of society came together to make a sacrifice on behalf of those who might be particularly vulnerable – especially the elderly.

Johnson says the government must be able to act quickly.

If the Covid crisis has taught us one thing, it is that this country needs to be ready for what may be coming and we need to be able to move with levels of energy and speed that we have not needed for generations.

Boris Johnson is starting his speech in Dudley now.

He says it may seem premature to give a speech on Britain after Covid now.

People are still nervous, he says.

But he goes on:

Yet we cannot continue simply to be prisoners of this crisis.

We are preparing to come slowly and cautiously out of hibernation and I believe it is absolutely vital for us now to set out the way ahead.

Labour is urging the government to hold a press conference this afternoon to explain the new lockdown in Leicester. This is from the shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth.

The government’s response to the situation in Leicester has left people anxious and confused.

We support the government’s decision to reintroduce lockdown restrictions. However, there are a number of outstanding questions about how the government intends to implement these restrictions and get the outbreak back under control.

There is confusion about essential travel and what it means for people who travel to work outside the boundaries. There is also no clarity about what extra resources will be put in place to increase testing capacity and what financial support will be available to businesses.

The government must take firm leadership on this. This is the first local lockdown. People in Leicester - and across the country - are looking for ministers to take responsibility for this issue.

Number 10 said the afternoon press conferences would now only take place if the government had ‘something really important to say’. We believe the situation in Leicester meets that criteria. That is why I am urging the health secretary to hold a press conference this afternoon and give the public the answers and reassurance they deserve.

Boris Johnson will be taking questions from reporters after his speech. But it won’t be a full press conference, because only a handful of journalists were invited to attend.

These are from the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, on the PM’s speech, which is due to start shortly.

At the Commons health committee Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers (which represents hospitals), said NHS staff were sent a letter on 29 April saying there was a plan to start regular testing of staff for coronavirus as soon as possible. But it has not started yet, he said. Hopson said:

I don’t feel like we are in an entirely satisfactory position. Our trusts felt that two months ago there was a commitment that we’d get to regular staff testing as quickly as possible but two months later we still don’t have a clear plan for doing that.

Liz Kendall, the MP for Leicester West, said she supported the local lockdown which began in the city on Tuesday, though she was “desperately worried” about schools and businesses closing.

Speaking on Sky News, the Labour MP said:

There are lots of questions and I’m getting lots of emails from constituents.

People who live in the city, but work in the country - can they still go to work?

Businesses who were desperately looking forward to opening again, are they going to get extra support? Will people be able to be furloughed for longer?”

She added that she hoped the government would work closely with local leaders to plan the city’s recovery.

Here is the Leicester local lockdown map

Leicestershire county council will be releasing a postcode checker for those living near the boundary and are unsure whether the local lockdown applies to them

There is going to be an urgent question in the Commons later about Sir Mark Sedwill, who has been forced out of his post as cabinet secretary and national security adviser.

He will be replaced as national security adviser by David Frost, the PM’s Europe adviser, who is a political appointee and who does not have a national security background.

Unusually, at about the same time, 12.30pm, the same issue is going to be raised in the Lords, where George Robertson, the Labour peer and former Nato secretary general, has tabled a PNQ (private notice question - the Lords version of UQ).

In his Telegraph column today (paywall) William Hague, the former foreign secretary and former Tory leader, is fiercely critical of the treatment of Sedwill.

Hague is normally quite supportive of the government, but he says the briefings against Sedwill were “reprehensible” and that Boris Johnson should have put a stop to them. Hague also says that is is worried about Sedwill being replaced by a political figure. He explains:

If we want the most promising people to serve the country, they have to come from varied points of view. All of us who have dealt with US administrations have witnessed the nightmare of changing long lists of officials when a new president comes in, leading to extended vacancies, loss of expertise and serious damage to diplomacy.

The latest briefing, reported in this newspaper, that the new cabinet secretary has to be a “Brexiteer” is not the way to go about appointing them. Of course, he or she will have to be very good at delivering Brexit, but that’s a different requirement. Some civil servants are brilliant at executing policies they didn’t vote for themselves.

In her column in the Times (paywall) today, Rachel Sylvester quotes an unnamed “friend” of Sedwill saying he will actually be quite relieved to get away from Johnson’s dysfunctional No 10. The source told her:

He’s fed up with them. There’s only so much you can put up with and the way they operate is appalling.

A Leicester shop owner has said businesses urgently need financial help if they are to avoid collapse due to the renewed lockdown placed on the city.

Joseph Hand, owner of Leicester Vintage and Old Toy Shop, said the lockdown had already put his business “two years behind” where he had hoped to be and he fears the stricter measures could stunt its growth further.

PA Media reports:

An Amazon Prime show about how the shop had survived and come through lockdown was released on Monday - the same day the renewed strict measures were announced by the health secretary, Matt Hancock.

Mr Hand said: “We have spent so much money trying to get set back up. During the lockdown, we did have financial help from the government, but running the shop like this we have had a lot of expenses.

“Businesses were all geared up to reopen. We need help. We understand a decision had to be made but we also need help.

“If it saves a couple of people, it’s fine. If it saves one person, that’s fine. A life is worth more than the money, but the fact is places will go out of business and are going out of business right now. For some people, this is the final straw.”

The shop had made preparations to reopen, including putting social distancing measures in place, and investing in new stock, but the new measures will mean a loss of walk-in trade.

Hand said the city is feeling “deep frustration”, but he has a four-year-old son who falls into the high-risk category so he understands why the decision has been made.

Leicestershire police said in a statement:

We continue to liaise with partners in relation to current health protection regulations and guidelines and respond appropriately to changes.

This is a dynamic situation and we will adjust accordingly providing proportionate policing under the relevant legislation to help keep people safe in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. Our approach has always been clear that we will use the four Es - engage, explain, encourage and enforce where necessary.

We continue to encourage communities to follow the government’s guidelines. Please continue to maintain 2 metres social distancing, wash your hands regularly and get a test if you believe you do have symptoms.”

BBC Leicester has just posted the map that shows which areas in Leicester are going into a new lockdown.

The localised lockdown will include:

• Braunstone Town (including Fosse Park)
• Glenfield
• Glen Parva
• Leicester Forest East (East of the M1)
• Thorpe Astley In Charnwood:
• Birstall
• Thurmaston
• All areas of Oadby and Wigston

This is from John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, on what Boris Johnson will be saying in his speech later.

Britain’s most senior police officer has urged the public to be calm and sensible when pubs reopen in much of England on Saturday, following tensions in London during recent protests and a number of unlicensed music events.

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, said her force has been planning for 4 July “for some time”.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

You will see a lot of police officers out on the street. There will be a lot more ready should people be out of order, should people get violent. But I’m not predicting that at this stage.

My message is: if you’re coming out on Saturday, be calm, be sensible. Look after yourself, look after your family. We are still in a global pandemic which is affecting this country very obviously. People need to be sensible.

With Scotland’s front pages dominated by Nicola Sturgeon’s refusal to rule out quarantining or screening visitors from England as she pursues a policy of elimination of the virus north of the border, the Scottish finance secretary, Kate Forbes, told BBC Radio Scotland this morning that it was “regrettable” that No 10 failed to discuss its plans about creating “air bridges” to allow travellers from selected EU countries to sidestep the 14-day quarantine rules with the Holyrood government.

Emphasising that the new rules only apply to England, Forbes said that her government would be providing clarity for Scottish holidaymakers “very soon”.

Meanwhile, more than 1,700 school cleaners, janitors and support staff have signed an open letter to Nicola Sturgeon, describing themselves as ”the workforce that seems to have been forgotten”, saying they do not feel safe at work and are being put at risk every day.

In the letter, the GMB union raises concerns over PPE and risk assessments. Scottish schools are set to return in August with no social distancing in place between pupils and staff if the virus has been suppressed adequately.

The shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, said there were delays in identifying local flare-ups of the virus in Leicester and called for lessons to be learned.

She told Sky News:

It took a long time for information about the scale of that hot spot to actually be communicated to the local authorities in Leicester. We can’t have that lengthy delay occurring again.

We really need to speed this up and of course we need test, track, and isolate working properly in the UK as it is in many other countries.

The mayor of Leicester, Sir Peter Soulsby, told Sky News the government has yet to announce the boundary of the local lockdown.

He said:

As yet the government has not announced what it accepts to be the boundary of this lockdown, so policing it is going to be something of a challenge until we know what the area is to be policed.

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, told BBC Breakfast that work was still being done to understand why Leicester had been so badly affected by the outbreak, according to a report by PA Media.

When asked about possible causes such as poverty, higher ethnic diversity, language difficulties and higher-density housing Mr Hancock said they were “familiar” to him.

He said:

We are still doing the work to understand exactly why the outbreak has been so bad in Leicester.

But lots of the reasons that you mentioned just then are familiar to me and people will find them intuitive.

Hancock said the government was looking at similar places, but said the outbreak in Leicester was “very significantly worse” than the next worst hit place.

Health minister Nadine Dorries tweeted:

Senior reporter Archie Bland went to Leicester to speak to residents on what new restrictions would mean.

He reports:

Rukhsana Hussain, a coordinator with the group, fears the inevitable uncertainty will make it all the harder. “It’s just such disheartening news. People have been building up hope – and now they’re wondering: will we ever get back to normal? And what does that look like? Is there even going to be a normal to go back to?”

Leicester’s residents could be forgiven for wondering: ‘Why us?’ There is no one answer. But Mezmin Malida, another coordinator with Project Hope, suggests that the city’s demographics make it vulnerable, with a large number of residents for whom English is not a first language, families nearby they are desperate to see, and limited access to public information. The advice that might seem inescapable in Westminster is anything but in North Evington, the city ward most severely affected so far.

There are questions on which local area will be next If Leicester does have to lockdown for longer as Covid-19 cases are rising in 36 cities and counties across England.

Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt said the Leicester lockdown is a “necessary puncturing of the elation that had been building up throughout the country” in the run-up to the easing of restrictions on 4 July.

Hunt, chairman of the commons health and social care committee, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the easing of restrictions would be a “stop, go” process until there is a vaccine, PA Media reports. “It’s not going to be smooth and there are going to be times when we have to go into reverse gear,” he said.

When asked whether there would be financial assistance targeted to Leicester because of the lockdown, Matt Hancock said: “The furlough scheme remains and is there, but we’ve also put in money to the local councils so that on a discretionary basis they can use that to support people who need further support.”

PA Media reports the health secretary also confirmed that a football match between Leicester City and Crystal Palace would go ahead this weekend.

The shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, has called on the government to adapt the furlough scheme for different industries instead of pursuing a “one size fits all approach”.

Dodds, who was speaking on Good Morning Britain, warned that mass unemployment could have a “scarring impact on our country for decades”.

She said:

If we look at what other countries are doing, and what the evidence tells us, that first step of stopping people becoming unemployed in the first place is absolutely critical.

Once people have become unemployed, that has a scarring impact on them and on our country for decades into the future.

So what I’m saying to the government, and I’ve offered this in the spirit of constructive opposition many times, I’ve said to them, please, shift course, do not continue to have this one size fits all approach, because that will inevitably lead to much greater unemployment in the future.

Dodds urged young people are kept in education and training for longer to “keep them out of that pool of unemployed people”, and better supporting those who become unemployed using previously used strategies like the future jobs fund.

Boris Johnson’s attempts to refocus his premiership by promising a “New Deal” for Britain in the wake of the coronavirus crisis has been described as “absolutely fanciful” by critics.

Heather Stewart, political editor of the Guardian, and Larry Elliott, the economics editor, report:

According to pre-released extracts, Johnson’s speech will highlight projects worth £5bn, which he will “accelerate”, including improvements to schools and hospitals, and “shovel-ready” schemes such as parks improvements.

Speaking in the West Midlands, he will claim his ambitions to rebuild Britain echo the achievements of Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR), who carried out a wholesale reconstruction of the US economy in the wake of the Great Depression and is remembered for large-scale projects such as the Hoover Dam.

But critics of the prime minister will likely highlight there is no new money in the announcement.

Some observers derided Johnson’s suggestion that his plan bore any resemblance to the 1930s White House.

“The notion that he’s going to turn himself into FDR seems absolutely fanciful,” said Prof Anand Menon, of the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank.

“FDR surrounded himself with experts, and drew on what they had to say, in a way that Boris Johnson so far has not.”

Read more here

The chancellor is expanding a £500m fund for UK startups hit by the coronavirus crisis, to ensure firms that shifted their headquarters abroad can still access the scheme.

The Future Fund will now benefit companies that are seen as British in all but name, having moved their parent company to tap US investors or take advantage of so-called accelerator programmes. Accelerators like US-based Y Combinator often ask firms to set up a US entity in order to access financing, mentorships and expert networks overseas.

Future Fund applicants will still have to prove that at least half of their staff are based in the UK and that they make at least 50% of their revenues from UK sales, the Treasury said.

“This change means that those startups who have strived to be the very best, and taken opportunities to grow their business, will be able to benefit from our world-leading Future Fund,” the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, said.

Morning and welcome to the UK liveblog. I’m Aamna Mohdin, I’ll be helming the liveblog until Andrew joins us later this morning.

Leicester is the first area to undergo a local lockdown, with schools shutting for most children and re-opened shops forced to close again. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced restrictions would be strengthened and continued for two weeks in a bid to combat a surge in Covid-19 cases.

Non-essential stores will close from Tuesday with schools shut to all but a small group of children from Thursday in a series of measures intended to quell coronavirus infections – which swelled by nearly 950 in a fortnight according to Leicester city council.

It means the city of more than 300,000 people will have to wait while the rest of England enjoys new freedoms, including the reopening of pubs and restaurants from 4 July, on what has been labelled “Super Saturday”.

Non-essential shops, which were only allowed to reopen earlier this month as part of lockdown easing, will have to shut again. The new measures in Leicester will be reviewed in a fortnight, Hancock said.

Here’s an explainer on what the local lockdown will look like.

Hancock will be doing the media rounds this morning, which I’ll be keeping an eye on.