Matt Hancock on the next steps of lockdown and whether we can book holidays

Virgin Radio

23 Mar 2021, 12:42

The Secretary of State for Health & Social Care joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about the light towards the end of the lockdown tunnel and managing summer holiday expectations.

He said: “We are on track to get this sorted here, but we're not there yet and on Monday next week we're going to be able to see up to six people or two households because we've changed that because we used to have just the rule of six, but that meant for big households they couldn't see anybody so six people, or two households, outdoors from next Monday.

“The thing where we're cautious is on international travel, but we're cautious on the whole thing, but on international travel in particular we don't yet know if we're going to be able to open that up this summer and hope to.

“I get the fact everybody wants a holiday, especially after the year we've all had, but we don't want to put at risk the progress that we're making here, where the number of deaths is down 90% and we've now got one of the lowest case rates in Europe and we've done 30 million vaccines and that's going very well.”

On being able to book holidays, he said: “The challenge is we're not going to know whether unfortunately you can go. It does look increasingly likely that things will be in good shape domestically this summer because things are going in the right direction but unfortunately we are seeing this problem on the continent that the numbers are going up. 

“At 3am last night Germany brought in some new measures and France has just done the same, and in particular the new variants which are our vaccine might not be able to deal with as well as the type of virus that we've got here.”

So what’s it like in Downing Street? He said: “We’re pretty good actually, there's a big team spirit, very positive, eyes on the prize. We’re all focused on how to get this country safely out of this. Big difficult judgments, but there's a real collegial spirit.”