Coronavirus: Jeremy Hunt urges UK to speed up contact tracing plans in bid to lift lockdown

Former health secretary also warns it is risky to ‘bet the farm’ on antibody testing

Ministers have to move fast if they want to use contact tracing to lift the lockdown next month, a former health secretary has warned.

Jeremy Hunt said South Korea has more than 1,000 people working on tracing, compared to fewer than 300 in the UK before the government halted the policy in March as coronavirus spread.

A “massive expansion” in the tracking of those suspected of having Covid-19 is needed, Mr Hunt said.

Mr Hunt said he was “concerned” and that major decisions on how the UK would resume widespread contact tracing had to be taken “very, very quickly”.

“If we want the Cabinet to have the option of raising the lockdown in three weeks time, then we have really got to get cracking,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Senior Conservatives are also pressing ministers to treat the public like grown ups and have a public conversation on the exit strategy to the lockdown.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, said the government should stop treating people “like children” by refusing to discuss the issue.

He told the Times: “The Government is going to have to accept and admit we are coming out of lockdown.

“We need to trust the British people and not treat them like children. We must respect their common sense. They need to know that the sun is rising at some point in an economic sense.”

That view was echoed by the Tory chairmen of a number of Commons select committees.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has accused ministers of a lack of transparency over an exit strategy because Boris Johnson is still recovering from coronavirus at Chequers.

The Prime Minister’s spokesman said that claim was “just wrong”.