UK Covid: 1,820 deaths reported in new record high alongside 38,905 new cases – as it happened

• The daily number of coronavirus deaths has reached 1,820, the highest since the pandemic began.

• The home secretary, Priti Patel, is at the centre of a fresh row after saying the UK’s borders should have been closed earlier, claiming she had been an advocate of shutting them at the start of the Covid pandemic last March.

• Downing Street has ruled out changing the vaccine priority list to give the police priority ahead of the over-50s - an idea floated by Patel this morning. (See 2.47pm.)

• The government has told schools to pause the daily coronavirus testing of students and staff in England, five weeks after it was announced as a “milestone moment” by the education secretary, Gavin Williamson.

• Coronavirus vaccines may need to be redesigned this year to boost protection against a new variant that emerged rapidly in South Africa, research suggests, while past Covid sufferers may not be protected against reinfection.

• The footballer Marcus Rashford has called on ministers to offer a guaranteed “meal a day” to all school pupils in England in financially struggling families as he warned that his campaign to end child food poverty still had a “million miles to go”.

• A British freight company director with more than over 20 years’ experience has told how EU hauliers and transport companies are turning their backs on UK business because they are being asked to provide tens of thousands of pounds in guarantees to cover VAT or potential tariffs on arrival in Britain.

That’s all from me for tonight. But our coverage continues on our global coronavirus live blog. It’s here.

Nicola Sturgeon has announced more than £250m of extra funding for Scotland’s drugs death emergency in a Holyrood statement that signified a change of tone in acknowledging the level of crisis the country faces, as well as bridging different approaches to improving services.

Sturgeon described this as “a national mission to end what is currently a national disgrace”, acknowledging “it is a reasonable criticism to say this government should have done more.”

She also emphasised the need to overcome the divide between the harm reduction and recovery communities in public debate, in order to work out what makes a difference to the individual.

While safe consumptions rooms – which have garnered much campaigning interest in Scotland - remain outwith her government’s powers, she says some funding will go to rolling out heroin-assisted treatment, currently piloting in Glasgow, across the country.

Funding will also go to substantially increasing the number of residential rehabilitation beds across the country, as well as crucial aftercare support, increasing the number of people in treatment for their addiction, and widening the distribution of the overdose-prevention drug naloxone.

Sturgeon also emphasised the importance of funding grassroots organisations who know their communities well, as well as the importance of reducing stigma that can prevent drug users from seeking help.

Last month she appointed Holyrood veteran Angela Constance to the newly created position of minister for drugs policy.

The number of patient in hospital in Scotland with coronavirus has passed 2,000 for the first time, according to today’s figures. There are 2,003 patients in hospital with Covid - up from 1,989 yesterday.

There have been 92 further deaths - the highest daily death total since Saturday 9 December (93).

And there have been 1,656 further cases, with 7.5% of tests giving a positive result.

The government is to announce new Brexit guidance within the “next day or two” to try and end food shortages in supermarkets in Northern Ireland.

The Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, said trials with hauliers had been conducted in the past 24 hours and he was hopeful of a solution.

He was speaking at the Northern Ireland affairs select committee after the DUP MP Ian Paisley told him the Brexit protocol was an “unmitigated disaster” for local businesses. Paisley, who along with his party backed Brexit, told Lewis:

I have haulage companies haemorrhaging £100,000 a week. They’re entering the fourth week of non-trade. I have a haulage company contacted me this morning have laid off people and told part-time staff to stay at home.

A lot of these companies will not be left standing by the end of these this month. They’re laying people off today. The company can’t wait for three months to see how bad this is. Just awful. Please fix it.

Lewis conceded the Northern Ireland protocol had seen “challenges” and “learning curves” since it entered into force on 1 January.

But he batted away demands that a grace period under which some of the new Brexit rules will not apply for supermarkets should be extended.

Echoing the EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, Lewis said now was the time to iron out the problems and implement the protocol, not to renegotiate it, as some of the issues could be ironed out over time.

One of the big problems has been delays to clearance for trucks arriving into Northern Ireland without the correct paperwork for each load.

This in particularly has affected “groupage” freight or lorries with mixed loads coming from more than one supplier. If one supplier has not completed their documentation properly, the entire lorry can be held over until that consignment is cleared.

Lewis also repeated his claim that delays at Dover before Christmas caused by the French travel ban was a contributing factor.

Here are some more of the key figures on the UK government’s coronavirus dashboard, which is recording 1,820 further deaths. (See 4.14pm.)

• Over the last seven days UK Covid deaths have been averaging 1,218 a day. That is 15% up on the average for the previous week.

• There were 39,068 Covid patients in hospital in the UK on Monday, the most recent day for which a UK figure is available. This is a new high, and the first time hospital numbers have passed 39,000.

• There were 3,887 UK Covid hospital admissions on Saturday. That was an increase on the total for Friday last week (3,661) but below the total for Tuesday last week (4,552), which is the highest daily admissions figure on record. Hospital admissions in the week to Saturday were only 0.5% higher than in the previous week. Yesterday the week-on-week increase was 3.6%, suggesting the UK is close to the point where the week-on-week figures will start to fall.

• Another 38,906 coronavirus cases have been recorded. That is up from 33,555 yesterday, but the week-on-week case numbers are still down 21.5%. Case numbers are coming down even though the number of tests being carried out remains broadly stable week on week.

• 4,609,740 people have now had the first dose of a vaccine, and 460,625 people have had a second dose.

The UK has just updated its coronavirus dashboard, and it says that 1,820 further deaths have been recorded. These are deaths of people who have died within 28 days of a positive test. This is a new record for daily deaths on this measure.

That is an increase of 210 (or 13%) on yesterday’s total (1,610), which was itself a record figure.

I will post more from the dashboard shortly.

Teachers in Wales are to decide GCSE, AS and A-level grades in Wales after a system to replace end-of-year exams was scrapped.

The Welsh education minister, Kirsty Williams, said the pandemic had left her “no choice” but to halt the system of classroom assessments.

Students will receive grades determined by their school or college, based on work they have completed over their course.

The announcement followed recommendations from the design and delivery advisory group that is made up of headteachers and college leaders.

Williams said:

The worsening situation with the pandemic has meant we have no choice but to revisit our approach to ensure wellbeing and public confidence in our qualifications system.

The proposals we are announcing today put trust in teachers’ and lecturers’ knowledge of their learners’ work, as well as their commitment to prioritise teaching and learning in the time available to support learners’ progression.

Teaching the core content and aspects of each course remains my absolute priority for learners in exam years, so they are supported to progress with certainty into their next steps, with confidence in their grades.

We are working with higher education institutions to look at how we can support learners through this transition, and can provide a bridge into university courses.

Here is a full summary of the Downing Street lobby briefing.

There are two officials who conduct the briefings at the moment: the PM’s spokesman, whom the media generally don’t name because he’s a civil servant with no aspirations to be a public figure; and Allegra Stratton, the press secretary, who is a political appointee and who is named because there is a plan for her to hold televised briefings.

• No 10 ruled out changing the vaccine priority list to give the police priority ahead of the over-50s. (See 2.47pm.)

• The prime minister’s spokesman would not comment in detail on why Boris Johnson ignored Priti Patel’s call for borders to close last March, but he said that all government decisions were based on “the best scientific evidence and data available”.

• Downing Street suggested the “complex” nature of the vaccine manufacturing process might explain why the vaccination rate has been slowing in recent days. The spokesman said “supply is the limiting factor”. Asked why supplies were being held up, he said: “As we and the companies have said previously, producing and manufacturing a vaccine is a complex process.”

• No 10 rejected claims that calling Sir Keir Starmer “Captain Hindsight” at PMQs contradicted Johnson’s call earlier this week for political debate to be “civil and kind”. Allegra Stratton, the PM’s press secretary, said Johnson used the phrase today to make a point about Starmer trying to take credit for proposals he is only backing retrospectively.

I don’t think any of us ... think is a rude word, or uncivil ... Captain Hinsight is not, in the prime minister’s opinion, an unpleasant name.

• Stratton said that there was “no way” the Conservatives could be called “nasty” in the light of the £280bn of support being put in place to help people during the pandemic. She was referring to the claim from Dame Louise Casey, the former welfare tsar, who has told the BBC that the Tories will be seen as the “nasty party” again if they do not extend the £20-per-week uplift in universal credit beyond March.

• Downing Street rejected the claim from Theresa May that the UK has abandoned its position of “global moral leadership” under her successor, Boris Johnson. (See 11.21am.) Asked about May’s comment, the PM’s spokesman said:

I would reject that characterisation. The UK is and will continue to be an outward-looking nation and will continue to be a leading voice on the international stage.

I would point to the work we have undertaken on climate change, both home and abroad, where we were one of the first countries to commit to net zero by 2050.

You’ve seen the role that we’ve played in response to the pandemic and the action we’ve taken to support Covax [a global initiative to ensure vaccines reach those in greatest need] and other issues where we’ve played a big part on the international stage.

• The spokesman said Covid-secure evacuation centres would be made available to those forced to leave their homes as a result of flooding.

• No 10 would not say whether Johnson thinks the Welsh Tory leader Paul Davies should lose his job because of his attendance at a drinking session at the Senedd. Asked if Johnson thought Davies should remain in post, Stratton said:

I haven’t had a conversation with him about that. But I would just say more broadly - and we will come back to this again and again - the prime minister needs everybody, no matter their status, no matter their position in life, to be going above and beyond in following the rules on Covid.

NHS England has recorded 1,027 Covid hospital deaths - defined as deaths of people who have tested positive for coronavirus. This is the largest daily death toll on this measure at any stage in the pandemic. The previous highest total came on Wednesday last week, when 1,012 hospital deaths were recorded.

This means that the overall total for UK Covid deaths (which goes beyond hospital deaths, and covers Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) published on the government’s dashboard at around 4pm this afternoon is also likely to be exceptionally high.

In addition to the deaths of the 1,027 hospital patients who tested positive, NHS England is also recording another 53 hospital deaths today of people who did not have a positive test, but who did have coronavirus mentioned on their death certificate. The details are here.

The Downing Street lobby briefing has just finished, and it seems we have a second example of Boris Johnson overruling Priti Patel, the home secretary. This morning, although she was at times opaque in interviews, Patel signalled that she would like the priority list for vaccines, which has been drawn up by the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), to be rewritten so that police officers could be included in phase one. (See 9.28am.) Under the current plan they will have to wait until phase two, unless they are over 50 or they have a serious underlying health condition.

But the prime minister’s spokesman said the government was sticking to the current plan. He said:

We will continue to work through phase one. The medical experts have set out clearly that it is those in phase one who are at the most clinical risk.

But he said the JCVI was looking at what would happen in phase two, and he said that ministers were in favour of police officers, teachers, firefighter and other people who come into contact with members of the public “to receive the vaccine as priority under phase two”.

I will post more from the lobby briefing shortly.

One theory of PMQs is that, when an opposition leader seems to be lined up for an obvious “win”, they come a cropper. It does not always work like that, but in some respects it did today. As a former head of the CPS, Sir Keir Stamer probably understands the importance of data from the Police National Computer better than anyone else in the Commons. But he made little headway in his four questions on the topic, and fared even less well with his final two, on Covid and borders.

On the plus side, Starmer arrived with clear, specific, detailed questions - normally the sort that work best at PMQs (and at press conferences too, for that matter). “How many criminal investigations could have been damaged by this mistake?” “How many convicted criminals have had their records wrongly deleted?” And Starmer’s best moment came when he responded to the slightly waffly first reply he got from Johnson.

That’s not an answer to my question. And it was the most basic of questions. It was the first question that any prime minister would have asked of those briefing him.

This was effective because it encapsulated one of the main concerns that people have about Johnson as prime minister, and one that is well grounded in reality; that is he not very good on detail.

But from that point on Starmer’s line of attack seemed to falter, and there are probably two reasons why. First, although Johnson may not have had answers to some of Starmer’s questions, he did have a reasonable response. “We don’t know how many cases might be frustrated as a result of what has happened,” Johnson said. Members of the public rightly get furious with politicians when they dodge questions, but people also recognise that ‘we don’t know’ can be an honest reply, and that’s what if felt like we were getting from Johnson.

The second problem with the Starmer strategy was a broader one. Opposition politicians, and the media, love to criticise governments over major administrative failings like this one, and it would be naive to pretend they don’t matter, but voters also recognise that cock-ups happen under all administrations, and that Priti Patel, and Johnson himself, weren’t personally to blame for what happened. Governments are vulnerable on policy decisions taken by ministers; on administrative bungling, by and large they are not.

Starmer used his final two questions to ask why Johnson did not do what Priti Patel was advising in March last year and close the borders. Perhaps border controls then might have made a difference. But Johnson could knock this back quite easily by saying that Labour weren’t calling for border closures at the time, and the fact that Starmer’s question was also the one Nigel Farage was championing this morning (see 11.44am) should perhaps have set some alarm bells ringing in LOTO as Starmer was drafting his script. Whatever the merits of this particular issue, being willing to over-rule Patel on policy is, in general, probably one of Johnson’s virtues not one of his flaws.

Boris Johnson starts by saying he looks forward to working with Joe Biden on their shared priorities.

And he thanks the emergency services and the Environment Agency for their work on the current flooding. He will later chair a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee on this, he says.

PMQs starts in five minutes.

Here is the call list showing which MPs are down to ask a question.

A Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech appears to protect against a coronavirus variant spreading rapidly across the UK, PA Media reports. Its story goes on:

The results come amid growing fears that the variant, dubbed B117, has mutations that may reduce the effectiveness of the vaccines designed to protect against Covid-19.

In a new study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers from BioNTech collected blood samples from 16 people who had received the Pfizer vaccine in previous clinical trials.

They found that a lab-made version of the virus - with all the mutations resembling the B117 variant - was neutralised by antibodies.

The researchers said their results indicate its is “unlikely that the B117 lineage will escape BNT162b2-mediated (Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine) protection”.

The Welsh government has drawn up plans to allow it to delay this year’s elections to the Senedd (Welsh parliament) for up to six months.

It plans to introduce the emergency legislation allowing the elections to be delayed a week today. The bill only needs a simple majority to pass, but if ministers were to use the new power to delay the elections, two-thirds of members of the Senedd would have to approve the decision.

Julie James, the Welsh government’s minister for housing and local government, said:

The Welsh government’s clear intention is that the next Senedd election should be held on Thursday 6 May 2021 ...

However, due to the unpredictable nature of coronavirus, there is significant uncertainty about what the situation will be like in May. That is why we are seeking the Senedd’s consent to introduce an emergency bill that would give members of the Senedd the powers necessary to manage the conduct of the election, in order to protect public health.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, took part in a Q&A on Covid on Sky News this morning. Here are the best lines.

• Vallance said that the vaccination programme was not yet “anywhere near” the point where it would bring the spread of the virus under control. He said:

The advice at the moment is vaccines are not going to do the heavy lifting for us at the moment, anywhere near it.

This is about, I’m afraid, the restrictive measures which we’re all living under and carrying on with those.

The numbers are nowhere near where they need to be at the moment, they need to come down quite a lot further - we need to make sure we stick with it.

• He said restrictions would be released gradually, not all at once.

It’s important to recognise this is not going to be a sort of big bang, ‘great, take the lid off, everything’s fine, we can all go back to normal’. This is going to be a slow release, monitoring carefully, understanding the effects.

• He said he had constantly argued for restrictions to be imposed early and hard. Asked what the government could have done differently, he said:

We will have got some things right and some things wrong, and we’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone through this, and we know a lot more about the virus today than we did then, for sure.

I think there is a very simple series of recommendations which I’ve been pushing continuously and I’ll continue to do so, which is the lesson is: go earlier than you think you want to, go a bit harder than you think you want to, and go a bit broader than you think you want to, in terms of applying the restrictions.

I’m afraid that’s a grim message but that is what the evidence says - you’ve got to go hard, early and broader if you’re going to get on top of this. Waiting and watching simply doesn’t work.

• He said he thought people would need regular coronavirus vaccines. He said:

I think it’s quite likely that we are going to need regular vaccination, at least for a few years, and I think it’s quite likely that those vaccines may need to change a bit as they do for flu every year. So I think that’s quite likely that we’re going to have to have some annual - maybe every two year - vaccination... but that will be planned in the way it’s planned for flu as well.

• He said it was not safe now to be relaxing visiting rules for care homes.

• He said at least 70% of the population would have to be vaccinated for it to acquire some degree of herd immunity. He said:

We know much less about the ability of the vaccine to stop transmission. We think it will stop transmission, but we don’t know by how much yet. And you’ll need very very high levels of population coverage - 70% or more - in order to get some degree of immunity across the whole population.

The government has told schools to pause the daily coronavirus testing of students and staff in England, five weeks after it was announced as a “milestone moment” by the education secretary, Gavin Williamson. My colleague Josh Halliday has the story.

Public Health England has issued a lengthy statement explaining its decision. The full text is here, and here is an extract.

Since the announcement of the schools testing programme in December, we have seen the emergence of a new variant of the virus which has become dominant in the UK. The variant has been shown to have increased transmissibility and causes higher secondary attack rates. This increases the risk of transmission everywhere, including in school settings.

Given that VOC202012/01 has higher rates of transmission and hence generates a higher secondary attack rate – and that the pandemic has entered a new phase – the balance between the risks (transmission of virus in schools and onward to households and the wider community) and benefits (education in a face-to-face and safe setting) for daily contact testing is unclear.

In light of this changing situation, we now recommend that the rollout of daily contact testing within schools is paused, other than for schools involved in further evaluation. This will enable the further detailed evaluation of changing circumstances including, potentially, lower infection rates and modelling work required to understand the benefits of daily contact testing in the this new phase of the pandemic.

Schools should continue to test their staff regularly (twice-weekly where possible, in line with recommendations for other workforces that need to leave the home to work) and test pupils twice upon return to school, as has been the case since the start of January.

Only yesterday Dr Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer for England, was defending the value of mass testing at schools at an education committee hearing.

And here are some more lines from Priti Patel’s morning interview.

• Patel, the home secretary, questioned data showing that the UK currently has close to the highest Covid death rate in the world. In several interviews she was asked about charts from Our World in Data, which at one point this week had the UK top of a league table for the seven-day average for new Covid deaths. In an interview on LBC Patel said the comparisons were not fair. She said:

The way in which death rates, data, is put together and published is different across the world. We’re not using the same data, metrics, for deaths, hospitalisations as other countries, so I would actually suggest it’s not actually like for like, it’s not comparable.

Patel, who stressed that the deaths were “dreadful” and “deeply tragic”, was also asked on BBC Breakfast if the figures were an indictment of the government’s handling of the crisis. She said it was not the right time for that conversation, telling the programme:

I don’t think this is the time to talk about mismanagement.

And she also stressed that the government had been following the recommendations of its scientific advisers. On LBC, when Nick Ferrari mentioned the death figures, he talked about a chart showing the UK having the second highest death rate in the world. It may have been this one, from Monday.

• Patel criticised the government’s scientific advisers for advising ministers that closing borders last spring would not make a difference. “Scientists advised us at the time, when coronavirus was incredibly high, it would not have made any difference to take border measures,” she told BBC Breakfast. According to the Guido Fawkes blog, Patel told Tory supporters on a call last night that she favoured closing the borders last March.

• She played down the impact of the loss of data from the Police National Computer saying that, because “there are multiple records across multiple systems around offences and individuals”, it was not clear yet how many records would be lost for good. Asked whether some people would “get away with” crimes due to the potential losses, Patel said:

No, it is not about serious criminals getting away with anything. Multiple records are held on the same individuals on the same crimes on other profiling systems as well.

Good morning. Priti Patel, the home secretary, has been doing the morning interview round on behalf of No 10 (which may be further proof that my colleague Peter Walker’s article last month struck a nerve), and she has confirmed that she wants to ensure that police officers get priority for the vaccine.

On the Today programme she was asked if there was a chance, provided the experts agreed, that the police could be “bumped up this queue” for the vaccine. She replied:

It’s those police, fire and other frontline workers. The health secretary [Matt Hancock] and I are working to absolutely make that happen. I will be very clear about that. That isn’t just something we are thinking about. There is a lot of working taking place in government right now. If the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation [JCVI] says that is a possibility, we can make it happen. We have the logistical plans in place. We will absolutely work to make that happen.

The current plan is to vaccinate the nine priority groups identified by the JCVI. There are 15 million people in the UK in the first four categories (care home residents, health and social care workers, and the over 70s), and they are meant to get their first dose by the middle of February. There are another 17 million people in the next five categories (the over-50s, and other adults with serious underlying health conditions), and they are meant to get their first dose by early spring.

The JCVI has not yet decided in what order it will vaccinate the rest of the population (adults under 50), but ministers have hinted strongly that the police, teachers and shop workers should get priority.

On the Today programme it was not entirely clear whether Patel was just saying she was pushing for the police to get priority in phase two (when the under-50s get vaccinated), or whether she wants the JCVI to change the nine-cohort priority list it has already drawn up. But when I asked an aide for clarification, I was told to read the transcript of her interview on LBC, where Patel was much clearer about wanting the priority list to be revised.

When Nick Ferrari, the presenter, asked if Patel wanted the police to be “moved up the ranks” for vaccinations, she said a lot of work was taking place on that issue. When Ferrari asked why that was not happening, if ministers were in favour, and why the police were not being treated like the over-75s, she said a vaccine delivery plan was in place. Ferrari then asked if that meant the police would be “promoted up”. Patel replied:

We’re working to achieve that ... I’ve been saying to policing partners in particular, get ready.

Ferrari then asked what again what was stopping Patel if this is what she wanted. She replied:

We’re working with the JCVI which is the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisations. They are the ones that are determining this, it’s not for politicians.

So, Patel wants to over-ride the current priority decisions taken by the JCVI - but has not yet got agreement for this in government. What we don’t know yet is how much support she has for this from ministerial colleagues. No doubt we will find out more as the day goes on.

Here is the agenda for the day.

12pm: Boris Johnson faces Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs.

12.15pm: Vaughan Gething, the Welsh health minister, holds a coronavirus briefing in Cardiff.

12.30pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions in the Scottish parliament.

12.30pm: Robert Buckland, the justice secretary, responds to an urgent question in the Commons about backlogs in the criminal justice system.

1.30pm: Downing Street is expected to hold its daily lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, gives evidence to the Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee.

Politics Live is now doubling up as the UK coronavirus live blog and, given the way the Covid crisis eclipses everything, this will continue for the foreseeable future. But we will be covering non-Covid political stories too, and when they seem more important or more interesting, they will take precedence.

Here is our global coronavirus live blog.

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