Coronavirus: Biosecurity advisers unable to provide full information on local clusters until August

New Biosecurity centre designed to work with contact tracing programme

The head of the body designed to suppress new coronavirus outbreaks has said it will not be able to provide information on local clusters until August.

Dr Clare Gardiner told MPs the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) centre was already providing national level data to ministers.

But Dr Gardiner, who has been in her job less than a week, said the organisation would not be fully able to do the same on a local level until the end of the summer.

Her forecast comes amid growing questions over the government’s plans for ‘local lockdowns’, if another outbreak hits.

The government wants to avoid a repeat of the national lockdown, by isolating ‘clusters’ as soon as they are identified.

But local government sources have expressed exasperation at what they say is a lack of information about how and when their communities are supposed to implement a local lockdown.

Dr Gardiner told MPs on the Housing, Communities and Local Government committee:

“The capability we are trying to build is quite complex and it will take time. The expectation is that we will be at full (capacity) by the end of the summer”.

The centre was announced with great fanfare as part of the UK’s road map out of lockdown last month. Part of NHS test and trace contact tracing programme, it is designed to be an early warning system.

However, it has already proved controversial.

It was initially supposed to set the government’s Covid-19 ‘alert level’, to communicate the current level of risk.

But No 10 was later forced to say it would "inform" that decision, after the intervention of the government’s medical advisers.

Dr Gardiner, the director general of the JBC, also told MPs there are no plans to provide R rates at a regional or local level, saying that information on outbreaks would be more useful.

Earlier, CouncillorIan Hudspeth, chairman of the Local Government Association’s Community Wellbeing Board, called for ward level data.

"My key ask is about good sharing of data," he told the committee.