If it is okay, I will start as you suggested by looking back a second. Clearly, this is a very difficult point for the country, on the weekend the Prime Minister alongside Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance were really clear that this second national lockdown is not what anyone would have wished, but it is necessary to protect our NHS capacity and protect lives. And if we look back I would like to talk briefly about what has been achieved in the last 6 months.

I know that it is hard to see it, but the picture of the country coming into this activity, coming into this second set of national measures, is very different to the last one. Our schools and universities are open, the NHS is not yet overwhelmed, and we have the data and insight to see what is coming so that we are able to act earlier.

As a country we are trying to balance the health of the population with the health of the economy, and society’s and individual’s needs, as Mathew just said, in terms of educating our children and our own mental wellbeing. These are clearly incredibly difficult decisions, and I have quite a large job, but those decisions are not for me, those are decisions outside of NHS Test and Trace. Those are ones for our elected leaders both nationally and locally to take.

Let me step back a step. COVID-19 is the greatest public health challenge we have faced in modern times, and NHS Test and Trace has been built in an extraordinarily rapid way to address that. We have built a system the size of Asda, from scratch, in 5 months. We are working around the clock to keep expanding and improving it.

To give you a sense of the scale, we have built a network of NHS, private and not-for-profit laboratories to take testing capacity from 2,000 tests a day in March to over 500,000 test a day today. Historically, this is more per head than Germany, Italy, Spain and the US. It is the largest diagnostic network the UK has ever seen, and I suspect it is the fastest growing public service we have ever built.

Yesterday we hit our target of 500,000 tests a day, from over 600 locations. So (I’m an ex-retailer), we have opened 600 shops in 5 months. We’ve now processed close to 32 million tests. We have also built the largest outbound call centre in the UK. So our contact-testing services are dealing with 7 times the volume it was 7 weeks ago, and so far we have contacted 1.4 million people and have asked them to isolate.

And we also have a digital wing, so you know we launched the COVID-19 app which has now had 19 million downloads in its first month, so 40% of the eligible population of the UK have it on their phones and that is a better performance than any other country where downloading isn’t compulsory.

And the response from business has been extraordinary to the app: over 700,000 QR posters are up and about across the country. None of this would be possible without public, private, national and local partnership. So we are, as a nation, throwing everything at this, and this is a combination of national insight and firepower with local intelligence and experience.

We have tripled the size of our local health protection teams to trace the virus and support businesses, and public sector employers locally when there are outbreaks. And we have got increasingly integrated teams which have developed some very strong relationships with local leaders and local businesses. But – and it is a big but – there is clearly more that we need to do.

This virus is incredibly difficult to deal with. And it is deadly, with millions of people carrying the virus around the world but not displaying any symptoms. Every country is grappling with the same problem, and despite everyone’s best efforts and all of the work of our team in the NHS Test and Trace to be the second line of defence, after Hands, Face and Space, the virus is spreading far too rapidly and too widely.

So if that’s where we are now and we look ahead as we go into another a really challenging period for us as a country, it is time for the organisation that I lead to take the next big leap forward. As lockdown slows us from the virus, we will be focusing on improving NHS Test and Trace, so that when England emerges from lockdown we are better able to live with COVID through the winter and beyond. We are thinking about that.

The work we have got to do is in 4 main areas.

The first one is scale. As I said, we built this extraordinary thing in 6 months but it needs to be substantially bigger and it will keep growing. We have been innovating and investing in new technologies, so these new mass testing, rapid testing technologies will give us the potential to scale testing much further. We have pilots in hospitals, schools and universities, which are showing some positive results already. As we announced last night into this morning, we will be working with Liverpool, the first city to deploy testing as a combination of the traditional swab testing and the new rapid turn around lateral tests that are quite like pregnancy tests.

So we have got to scale up testing, and as we find more and more positive cases we’ve got to scale up contact tracing as well. We are already the largest outbound calling centre in the UK, but it’s got to get bigger as we find more people with the disease, and we’ve got to get faster. Our turnaround times for both testing and contact tracing are improving, but this is the ultimate perishable good. We need to find people who have been in close contact with people who have got the disease within 24 to 48 hours. So there is a big job of work for my team to do to keep speeding up. And we can only do this as I have said through partnership.

This is about working in partnership with the public and the private sector, with national and local organisations and with everyone in the country. And I’m sure that many people watching this have read that Stan McChrystal’s book ‘Team of Teams’, this is the ultimate team of teams – we are actually 60 million people on the team. We have all got to change our behaviour just a little bit to come forward with the testing to isolate when we are told to. That’s how you break the chains of transmission.

And the fourth area we are working on is how we get even better at using the data in the analysis to drive insight in action we can stamp on outbreaks faster and faster. We know so much more than we did 6 months ago about how the disease is spreading. We’ve got the data from Test and Trace, we’ve got the data from waste water. We’ve got data from all these surveys using the testing capacity we have built. We are all learning how to use that to stop it spreading.

And I know that it is really tough and horrible for everyone as we head towards Thursday. But I am actually quite hopeful that we have more tools in the armoury than we had before. As a society we have learnt about the first line of defence, washing our hands, keeping our distance and wearing our face mask. Test and Trace did not exist in March. It is a scale organisation the same size as Asda and it will get even bigger. And so our second line of defence is growing, and technology will help us through a combination of vaccine, mass testing and better treatment. There is a lot for us actually to be optimistic about that we will crack this.

The Chief Vets from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are urging bird keepers to maintain and strengthen their farm biosecurity measures in order to prevent further outbreaks of avian influenza in the UK.

As of today (6 November) the risk level of avian influenza incursion in wild birds in Great Britain has been raised from ‘medium to ‘high’ following two unrelated confirmed cases in England this week and increasing reports of the disease affecting flocks in mainland Europe.

All bird keepers are being urged to prevent direct or indirect contact with wild birds, with the risk of infection of poultry in Great Britain also being raised from ‘low’ to ‘medium’. Wild birds migrating to the UK from mainland Europe during the winter period can spread the disease to poultry and other captive birds.

Northern Ireland’s risk of avian influenza incursion remains medium for wild birds and low for poultry, but is being kept under constant review.

Following two confirmed cases of avian influenza in England and further cases reported in mainland Europe, we have raised the risk level for incursion to Great Britain from migratory birds to high. We have also raised the risk level for the disease being introduced to poultry farms in Great Britain to medium. While Northern Ireland’s risk level is currently medium for wild birds and low for poultry, the situation is being kept under constant review.

We have acted quickly to prevent the spread of disease at both sites in England and are continuing to monitor the situation closely. Bird keepers should remain alert for any signs of disease and report suspected disease immediately.

It is important now more than ever that bird keepers ensure they are doing all they can to maintain and strengthen good biosecurity on their premises to ensure we prevent further outbreaks.

The UK has robust biosecurity measures and monitoring in place to prevent the disease spreading in this country and the risk of transmission of avian influenza viruses to the general public in the UK remains very low.

There are some simple measures that all bird keepers, whether they are running a large commercial farm, keeping a few hens in their back garden, or rearing game birds, should take to protect their birds against the threat of avian flu in the coming winter months.

These include:

• Keeping the area where birds live clean and tidy, controlling rats and mice and regularly cleansing and disinfecting any hard surfaces
• Cleaning footwear before and after visits
• Placing birds’ feed and water in fully enclosed areas that are protected from wild birds, and removing any spilled feed regularly
• Putting fencing around outdoor areas where birds are allowed and limiting their access to ponds or areas visited by wild waterfowl
• Where possible, avoid keeping ducks and geese with other poultry species.

The Government continues to monitor for incursions of avian flu and is working with the poultry and game bird industries; hen rehoming and pure and traditional poultry breeds stakeholders to help reduce the risk of disease.

Further information:

The government’s outbreak assessment following the two confirmed cases in England can be accessed here.

Avian influenza of the H5N2 strain was first confirmed on Monday (2 November) in a small commercial poultry premises in Kent where a 1km Low Pathogenic Avian Influenza LPAI Restricted zone has been put in place all birds at the small mixed species commercial premises have been humanely culled to limit the spread of the disease.

A separate and unrelated case of avian influenza of the H5N8 strain was later confirmed at a site in Cheshire and 3km Protection Zone and 10km Surveillance zone were put in place and all 13,500 birds at the farm have been humanely culled. Testing has confirmed this is a highly pathogenic strain related to the virus currently circulating in Europe.

There have also been a number of confirmed reports of avian influenza in wild birds including geese and swans in the Netherlands and north of Germany in recent weeks. These wild birds are all on the waterfowl flyway from breeding grounds in western Russia, where the H5N8 strain was reported in poultry in mid-October.

Avian Influenza is in no way connected to the COVID-19 pandemic which is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus which is not carried in poultry.

HMCTS welcomed the highest ever number of attendees to the fourth iteration of its Annual Public User Event, which switched to an online format this year in response to the impacts of COVID-19.

Online sessions were spread across three days this week (3, 4, 5 November), covering the work of criminal, civil, family, tribunals and cross-jurisdictional reform projects over the past 12 months, in a year that has been significantly impacted by the programme’s need to respond to the pandemic.

Professional and public users attended this year’s event and were given the opportunity to engage with the latest services and ask questions to those responsible for delivering the reform programme.

As the event concluded, HMCTS Strategy & Change Director, Gemma Hewison, reflected:

“I was delighted that in spite of the disruption caused by COVID-19, we were able to put on our showpiece event for public users once again, attracting record numbers in the process. The innovation displayed by our Public User Engagement team to make this week happen, and the efforts gone to by those working across the reform programme to deliver their sessions during what has been an intensely busy few months for HMCTS, goes to show how dedicated we are to putting the people who use our services at the heart of everything we do.

“I am hugely grateful to everyone who attended for their involvement and invaluable contributions, and am feeling energised as we lead the programme into its next phase.”

Jurisdictional overviews

Ahead of the event, deputy directors provided overarching summaries of progress made this year in the criminal, civil, family and tribunals jurisdictions. Their overviews can be viewed below.

Gillian Brooks, Service Owner for Crime – criminal jurisdiction overview and welcome

Simon Vowles, Service Owner for Civil – civil jurisdiction overview and welcome

Adam Lennon, Service Owner for Family – family jurisdiction overview and welcome

Daniel Flury, Service Owner for Tribunals – tribunals jurisdiction overview and welcome

Presentations

Attendees were given the opportunity to choose from a range of sessions across the three days, depending on their area of interest or expertise. Recordings of these sessions are available:

Day one: Civil and crime jurisdictions

This playlist includes a range of sessions. For civil, it includes changes to the civil money claims service, as well as some of the response work being completed for possession. Crime presentations include information about the rollout of Section 28, Common Platform, misconceptions about jury service and how we are improving our up-front engagement with defendants.

Day two: Tribunals and cross-cutting jurisdictions

For tribunals, this playlist focuses on the changes being made as a part of our reform programme. It also includes presentations from a number of projects that cut across multiple jurisdictions, such as remote hearings, the future operations teams and work to understand users with additional complex needs.

Day three: Family jurisdiction and COVID-19 topics

Many digital services from the family jurisdiction are now live and this playlist includes demonstrations of some of those services, such as the C100 and family public law, as well as other services within the Family Courts. COVID-19 topics include sessions about HMCTS’ response to the impacts of the pandemic, court safety, consideration of vulnerable users and our new Nightingale Courts.