‘The government is hanging the city out to dry’: The story of Leicester’s lockdown – and the lessons to be learnt

Two weeks on from when the city was first placed into lockdown following a spike in cases, The Independent looks back at how the local outbreak has been handled

The fear for residents and businesses in Leicester is that the lockdown will continue well beyond the 18 July review (Getty)

As the rest of England continues to ease itself out of lockdown, free to enjoy liberties that had been wrapped up and stored away for 12 long weeks, life in Leicester remains on pause.

Two weeks have now passed since the government tightened the city’s restrictions, denying its 330,000 residents that collective sigh of relief which has been enjoyed in so many parts of the country.

There is, of course, a long way to go in the UK’s fight against coronavirus – and Leicester is the leading example of what awaits those communities that find themselves confronted with a resurgence in cases.

But while the decision to place the city back into lockdown was justified – at one point, Leicester accounted for 10 per cent of all new infections in England – concern has been raised over the government’s approach to and handling of this outbreak.

Numerous local leaders and health experts have told The Independent that the initial decision to lock down Leicester was preceded by miscommunication and a catalogue of errors and delays that only served to exacerbate the city’s situation.

PHE East Midlands first confirmed an increase in cases on 15 June, but told Leicester City Council that “we have not identified … an outbreak to date”. A meeting with PHE Track and Trace followed two days later, in which additional data appeared to highlight the growing issue, before health secretary Matt Hancock announced the outbreak on 18 June – without having consulted local officials.

“We were getting reassurance that there wasn’t a problem,” Sir Peter Soulsby, mayor of Leicester, tells The Independent, adding that PHE had only ever suggested extending the existing restrictions – rather than a return to lockdown – due to the “likely” possibility that the apparent rise in infections was a result of increased testing across the city.

This recommendation was made to the city council in an unpublished summary the day before Hancock announced the lockdown, on Monday 29 June, and Soulsby claims that it was eventually “omitted” from the final version of the PHE report as it was “at odds” with what ministers were briefing at a national level.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said: “Seeing that cases in Leicester were significantly higher than other parts of the country, we took decisive action to save lives and we make no apology for doing so.”

Amid conflicting advice, and what Soulsby describes as a lack of “government intervention” in the run-up to the lockdown announcement, Leicester officials were also hamstrung by the absence of Pillar 2 testing data, which highlighted the growing number of cases within the community. It took more than a week for the government to hand over this crucial information to local authorities.

“It didn’t help that we didn’t get the data early enough,” Kamlesh Khunti, a member of the Independent Sage board and a professor of vascular medicine at the University of Leicester, tells The Independent. “They knew centrally about this many days before public health locally were informed about it.”

Although Leicester’s council now has access to the relevant Pillar 2 data, there are lingering concerns over its “shortfalls”, says Professor Khunti. “We’re not getting data to postcode level. We really need it drilled down to a very small area so we can isolate that street for example and do things more intensely.

“There’s lots of data missing: ethnicity, what their job is – all of that type of data. We’re only getting positive results locally, not the negative results. We’re not getting data on how many people are contacts and how many people they’ve managed to contact trace and how many of those are isolated.”

As for the track and trace data, Professor Khunti says it should be delivered to local authorities “straight away”, rather than funnelling back to central government first. “We need real-time, next-day data,” he adds.

Door-to-door testing is now being delivered in parts of the city, while walk-in centres have been established, but without the finer details, officials are left facing a half-formed picture that makes it difficult to determine the next steps.

The DHSC insists all the required data is available, saying that details of postcodes and ethnicity are included in the testing results provided to local directors of public health.

Either way, the latest figures show that Leicester’s seven-day infection rate has been reduced from 135 to 117 cases per 100,0000 people – but there remains a long way to go. Bradford, which has the second-highest infection rate in the UK, has just 30 cases per 100,000.

The fear for residents and businesses in Leicester, then, is that the lockdown will continue well beyond the 18 July review, running the risk of further job losses and damaged livelihoods. And after the government made it clear “there are no plans” to extend or change the scope of its current financial support package, many in the city feel that they have been abandoned.

“The government is hanging the city out to dry,” said Liz Kendall, the MP for Leicester West. “We deserve better than a government who just seems willing to leave people to fend for themselves.”

Restrictions in Leicester will be reviewed on 18 July (Getty)

Business Improvement District (BID) for Leicester, a not-for-profit organisation which represents 697 companies in the city, has meanwhile warned that many firms are “facing an existential crisis”, telling The Independent that “exceptional support” should be provided for the “exceptional hardships” the local economy is facing.

“We are asking for further support to be drawn from the £1.7bn unallocated funds remaining from the initial government business support grants. Currently, Leicester City Council holds £10m in unallocated grants, which under current regulations needs to be returned,” says BID director Simon Jenner. “This approach could be replicated to provide businesses support in any future localised measures introduced elsewhere in the country.”

A government spokesperson said that the measures surrounding local lockdowns will continue to be carefully assessed and reviewed, adding that “our support package is one of the most comprehensive in the world, with more than £6.5bn injected into the welfare safety net”.

As for what comes next, The Independent reported last week the government has yet to devise a concrete strategy for Leicester’s route out of lockdown. A two-hour meeting of more than 90 people from different aspects of government and the civil service was held last Tuesday, during which officials sought to determine the current scale of the city’s outbreak and what steps will be taken after this week’s review.

One slide shown during the meeting raised the possibility of even tightening restrictions after 18 July, though The Independent has been told “no one is seriously contemplating this option”.

For now, there is “no consensus” of what action to take. The government “haven’t got any clue of what might be the route out and the thresholds that need to be reached to achieve this,” says Soulsby. “They’re reviewing it [the lockdown] at the end of next week, but there is no consensus in government. There is no consensus on whether it has been a success.”

The DHSC said it was ”working closely with the local authorities so that these necessary restrictions can be removed as soon as possible”.

For all the government’s shortcomings, Soulsby has also drawn his fair share of criticism during this period. Earlier this month, health minister Nadine Dorries accused him of “failing to accept” the data showing there was a problem in the city, while, more recently, a senior government source told The Independent that the mayor’s “grandstanding” was “distracting local officials on the ground”.

“He’s not only out of his depth but actively hampering the operation,” the source said. “There’s a lot of very clever and busy people wasting their time trying to tell him things he clearly has no ability to understand.”

Nigel Porter, Leicester’s only Liberal Democrat councillor, has meanwhile told The Independent that Soulsby hates to be challenged in member briefings, has repeatedly insisted there’s “no such thing as an R rate” and, in June, turned down a “really cheap” deal which would have allowed the city council to provide all residents in the ward of Aylestone with free face masks. The council said the offer was never raised directly with the mayor.

“Soulsby’s way of dealing with it is to go on the attack,” says Porter. “Rather than trying to work with the health executive and the government, he’s decided to go at them and decide they’re conspiring against him. He’s failed as a leader.” Porter also added that, from the very beginning, the situation had been “badly handled” on both sides, and said there was a “blame game going on between the government and the council”.

Regardless of where the bulk of responsibility lies, there are important lessons to be learnt from Leicester’s lockdown. Local officials have been kept out the loop, data has been withheld, and all trust lost between the national and subnational centres. Messaging has been mixed and opaque, with those at the local level frustrated at how instructions have been communicated, while the government has grown weary of Soulsby’s “hostile” approach, leaving the two parties stuck in a deadlock.

Through it all – amid a scarcity of answers as to what has actually been driving the city’s outbreak – it is the people of Leicester who have lost out. More lives are likely to have been lost, businesses forced to the brink and the local economy further decimated. Uncertainty, confusion and indecision persists with no clear way out of the crisis.