Oldham could be just 48 hours away from potentially being ordered into a “catastrophic” and “premature” local lockdown, its council leader has warned.
In an interview with the Guardian Sean Fielding said that being “pushed” into a full Leicester-style lockdown would be disastrous for Oldham’s already struggling economy and would not be “based on evidence”.
“Everything that is within our power we are doing, and there is some early evidence that is having an effect on the infection rate,” he said. “But we do need more time to see if that has really played out. I do think that moving into a local lockdown would be really premature.”
In an attempt to stave off a full lockdown, Oldham officials have written to central government offering to tighten local restrictions says the report, including banning households from meeting inside or outside – and stepping up enforcement action by police and environmental health officers.
The closure of bars, restaurants and shops would make no “measurable difference” to the transmission of the virus in Oldham, Fielding said, because the vast majority of new cases were spreading between households. “I don’t think it would be based on science or based on evidence if we were to be pushed into a local lockdown.”
Fielding appealed to ministers to give local authorities more financial support to tackle the virus. He said Oldham council was “down £20m in our budget” and having to consider cutting essential services such as employment support.
Door-to-door contact-tracing work in the borough is being staffed by volunteers and council staff from other departments. “The government said that they’d give us the funding to deal with the financial impacts of this disease, but it hasn’t happened,” he said.
Meanwhile according to the Manchester Evening News’s Jennifer Williams Last week was really tricky, because of the cases in Oldham,” says a senior figure familiar with the mayor’s thinking at the time
“By Monday, they were going over 100 cases per 100,000. That really alerted everybody. There was a recommendation at government level to impose full lockdown on Oldham, so there was a question of what other measures could be done.” said the report
Greater Manchester’s Mayor Andy Burnham had meanwhile advised the Government against ‘overreacting’.
Speaking at a weekly media briefing last week, he warned that ‘What worked in Leicester is not necessarily going to be right for Greater Manchester, given the interconnected nature of the city region, and I think we’re going to have to have a very considered approach to this rather than crude measures which become further divisive among different communities and different boroughs.
