Covid news – live: WHO recommends Oxford vaccine as Boris Johnson urges missing two million people to get jab

Good morning and welcome to the latest updates on the coronavirus pandemic.

Ten-year jail sentences for travellers who try to conceal journeys to high-risk countries have been branded "extraordinarily high".

Former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption hit out at the punishment and said it should not compare to those for violent or sexual crimes.

"Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years?" the peer wrote in the Daily Telegraph.

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve also told the paper: "The maximum sentence of 10 years for what is effectively a regulatory breach sounds, in the circumstances, unless it can be justified, extraordinarily high."

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said the number of people currently travelling to the UK from red list countries "probably comes to less than 1,000 a day".

On whether 1,500 passengers could be arriving from red list countries each day, he said: "I've seen some of those numbers thrown around and I don't think they're correct.

"Because if you think about the very small number of people who are travelling at the moment, travel is 95% down on where it was this time last year.

"And of the remaining people who travel, once you strip out the lorry drivers who are bringing our medicines and foods here, frontier workers, actually, the number of people travelling overall is very low and then beyond that, we're only talking about another subsection of people who are travelling here from those red list countries where there are no direct flights, in any case."

Asked about an exact number of arrivals from red list countries, Mr Shapps said: "Even at the moment, that probably comes to less than 1,000 a day.

"And by next week, when people will have to pay to do this, £1,750 package on top of their costs of getting here via an indirect route, I think we'll find the numbers are actually pretty small."

Ten-year jail sentences for travellers who conceal the fact they have come from a coronavirus hotspot have been branded “draconian” and “completely disproportionate” by a former Conservative attorney general, political correspondent Ashley Cowburn reports.

The remarks from Dominic Grieve comes after Matt Hancock unveiled the tough new measures for tourists, including forcing those travelling from 33 “red list” countries to pay £1,750 to quarantine for 10 days in government-designated hotels.

The government's new border quarantine measures are "too limited", Labour's shadow home secretary has said.

Speaking to Times Radio, Nick Thomas-Symonds commented: "I feel they are too limited. I think we are in a race against time.

"We should be doing everything we can to guard against that prospect of having a mutant strain of the virus reaching our shores from overseas that really damages our vaccine efficacy, our vaccine rollout.

"And to do that, we need that comprehensive system that I've been arguing for.

"Of course, it would be subject to exceptions, like hauliers, and there's another list that already exists of quarantine exceptions.

"But we need that comprehensive system. We need it urgently and we can't afford to continue to be behind the curve in the way this government has."

The transport secretary has raised the prospect of international travel being outlawed until all UK adults have been vaccinated, travel correspondent Simon Calder reports.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Grant Shapps said travelling abroad would depend on "everybody having their vaccinations” in the UK – and potentially abroad.

Access to coronavirus vaccines needs to be "fair and equitable" among countries, a World Health Organisation (WHO) official said.

Dr Siddhartha Datta, WHO Europe's programme manager for vaccine-preventable disease and immunisation, told Sky News that 37 countries in the WHO European region have rolled out Covid-19 jabs.

He said: "The lower-middle income countries and the lower income countries of our region are falling behind."

Dr Datta added: "If you say that whether we should be concerned, the answer is yes, the inequity in the vaccine rollout is evident."

He said efforts were being made to ensure people got access to a vaccine, such as through the Covax mechanism.

Dr Datta said: "Fair and equitable access to this global public good, as we say, is paramount.

"And I think we have to ensure and make sure that we do have mechanisms that a country irrespective of its income level gets access to this vaccine.

"Just keeping us safe will not keep everybody safe."

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has revealed that his father is on a coronavirus ward in hospital, and has been for "quite some time".

"The work they (NHS staff) do is incredible, I speak to them every single day, of course, we have not been able to visit my dad for two months now," he told Good Morning Britain.

"What they have been doing for nearly a year now has been extraordinary and, as you said, it has, of course, been worse now, even though numbers are coming down in hospital.

"And the one good piece of news we had yesterday is my father was transferred from a larger Covid ward to a slightly smaller one.

"We said 'Well, what's going on here?' And they said that 'Actually we are starting to see a reduction in patients'.

"But even now, even with that reduction, it's still higher than it was in the first peak so we are not out of this yet, we just need to adhere to the lockdown and to the rules to stop more people ending up in those hospitals."

Extra coronavirus testing will be carried out in areas of south London after a case of the South African variant was discovered.

The surge testing and genomic sequencing will be rolled out in parts of West Norwood and a small section of Streatham in the borough of Lambeth, the Department of Health and Social Care said.

People over the age of 16 living or working within the SE27 0, SE27 9 and SW16 2 postcodes are strongly encouraged to take a Covid-19 test this week, whether they are showing symptoms or not.

Lambeth council said: "This is to help us track any potential cases after a case of the variant of Covid-19 that was first identified in South Africa was discovered in the area."

Grant Shapps has defended the threat of a 10-year jail sentence for travellers who try to conceal journeys from high-risk countries, saying the British public "would expect pretty strong action".

"It's up to 10 years, it's a tariff, it's not necessarily how long somebody would go to prison for," the travel secretary told BBC Breakfast.

"But I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by deliberately misleading and saying that you weren't in Brazil or South Africa, or one of the red list countries, which as you say does include Portugal.

"But I think the British public would expect pretty strong action because we're not talking now just about, 'oh there's a lot of coronavirus in that country and you might bring some more of it back when we already have plenty of it here'.

"What we're talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter, because we don't want to be in a situation where we later on discover that there's a problem with vaccines."