Will lockdown be extended? Rishi Sunak says 28 days locked into law – but review expected

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has sought to reassure Conservative MPs by saying he “hoped” England’s looming lockdown would end in four weeks – and claimed they would get a chance to vote on any extension beyond 2 December.  

There is growing unrest over the possibility shutdown measures could continue into 2021, after Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said ministers would have to examine the evidence before deciding whether to lift national curbs at the start of next month.  

Mr Sunak said the government would “review” the evidence throughout November, but insisted MPs would get the chance to vote again if they approved the 28-day lockdown this Wednesday.

“Our expectation and firm hope is that on the basis of everything we know today is the measures we put in place … will be sufficient to do the job we need and we will seek to exit these restrictions back into a tiered approach at the end of the four-week period,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.  

He added: “The regulations that are coming into force, these will be debated in parliament, as a matter of law will be a four-week set of regulations that expire on 2 December …  they are time-limited.”

Ahead of his statement in the Commons on Monday afternoon, Boris Johnson is expected to meet leading Tory backbenchers at Downing Street in a bid to assure them he wants to return to the localised, tiered system on 2 December.

However Dr Susan Hopkins, the government’s chief medical adviser on test and trace, raised the possibility of a longer shutdown when she said on Monday morning that a lockdown would last a “minimum” of four weeks.

It followed a warning by Sir Jeremy Farrar, a member of the government’s Sage advisory group, who said people should not be “fixed” on 2 December since it wasn’t clear what infection levels would be at the end of November.

Unnamed cabinet ministers also told The Times that they believed the lockdown may have to be extended until 2021. One said: “I think it’ll be after the new year. The rate of transmission is not going to go down enough to justify it. Just look at the graphs. It’s going to be a jobs disaster.”

Mr Sunak would not say exactly when the government would decide whether an extension might be needed. “I can’t give you a precise date but we keep a watchful eye on this all the time.”

Speaking at the CBI conference on Monday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused Mr Sunak of “blocking” a circuit-breaker lockdown in September. He said the decision “to pretend that you can protect the economy without controlling the virus” would mean businesses have to close for longer.

Mr Sunak is also under pressure to extend furlough payments in Scotland, should first minister Nicola Sturgeon bring in a full lockdown.

Scotland’s finance secretary Kate Forbes said: “UK Treasury continues to deny our request that full furlough at 80 per cent be made available for businesses and employees in Scotland at any point we need it, suggesting that it is only available for the duration of a lockdown in England.”

Meanwhile, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives has attacked Mr Johnson for rejecting advice from his scientific advisers for an earlier national lockdown, and also said he wrong to resist Scottish government calls for a furlough extension.

Douglas Ross said the furlough scheme should be available for any part of the UK if it were to go into lockdown. “I’m stressing very strongly, very clearly and very publicly, to say this is an absolute must for Scotland,” he said.