Coronavirus UK news update – June 21 lockdown lifting could be DELAYED for months, Rishi Sunak suggests

LOCKDOWN lifting could be delayed for months beyond June 21, Rishi Sunak warned today.

Speaking to Sky News during a visit to Teeside, the Chancellor revealed he extended his multi-billion furlough scheme until September because the current lockdown roadmap plan “might change”.

“I wanted people to have the reassurance that we were ‘going long’, beyond the end of the road map, because of course things might change.

“Hopefully that won’t happen, we are making great progress… Things will take a bit of time to get back to the way they were, so I think it is important to provide that extra cushion,” he added.

The news comes despite coronavirus case numbers in the UK being “better than anybody was expecting”.

On Tuesday, deaths dropped by 37 per cent in a week with 343 fatalities recorded.

Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh Uni and a Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group member, said the new data showed Britain should end lockdown early.

“The data are indeed looking better than the models were predicting and – to the best of my knowledge – better than anyone was expecting,” he told The Telegraph.

“If the phrase ‘data-driven not date-driven’ has any meaning, then it must allow for the schedule for relaxing restrictions to be brought forward if the data are better than expected and not just putting the schedule back if the data are worse than expected.”

Although he urged caution on the risks of relaxing measures too soon, Woolhouse said there was “a public health imperative to relax measures as soon as it is safe to do so”.

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