Drivers whose MOTs are due during the pandemic shutdown will enjoy a one-year exemption, a minister in Northern Ireland has said.
It would not be possible to accommodate the backlog as well as conduct normal business at testing centers, infrastructure minister Nichola Mallon said.
Drivers will instead apply for MOTs as normal next year. Mallon said:
I have decided the Driver and Vehicle Agency (DVA) will continue to issue temporary exemption certificates (TECs) to those vehicles, private cars, goods vehicles, trailers or motorcycles until their normal MOT date.
This means a vehicle will get an exemption for one year which will bring it back into the system when there is capacity to test it.
On 38 March, in the interest of public safety and to tackle the spread of coronavirus, the DVA suspended all vehicle testing for three months, until 31 June.
In the health committee J eremy Hunt
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In lighter news, the comedian Jason Manford has said he was turned down for a job at Tesco that he applied for earlier on in the pandemic “when it looked like supermarkets etc were going to need thousands of extra hands ”
Jason Manford (@ JasonManford)
Still nothing !
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Harries says that was not a decision for the chief medical officers.
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Lucy Campbell
Good morning everyone. I’m Lucy Campbell, joining the blog for the rest of the day to bring you all the latest developments on coronavirus in the UK. If you’d like to get in touch with news tips or comments, advice and suggestions, please feel free to do so via the usual channels.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @ lucy_campbell _
Vallance says the idea that you could control this outbreak by stopping travel from one place would not work.
He says the advice from Sage was that either very draconian travel restrictions had to be imposed, or else it was not worth it.
Back in the health committee, Vallance
Vallance says he is sure there are lots of things. He says it is standard in clinical practice to think how you could have done something better.
He says:
In the early phases, if we had managed to ramp testing capacity quicker, it would have been beneficial.
For all sorts of reasons that did not happen. And I think it’s clear you need lots of testing for this.
But he says Harries was right to say testing on its own does not provide the solution.
He says there will be plenty of opportunity to consider what might have been done better.
Going forward, different countries will try different things. That amounts to an experiment, he says.
But he says different countries have different characteristics.
He says it is not chance that two big, cosmopolitan cities – London and New York – have been hit badly.
What works in Iceland won’t necessarily work in other places, he says.
Harries says the plan was sensible.
But we are in a different world now, she says. She says perhaps we have not thought through the digital aspects of this enough in our planning.
She says we have learned from previous incidents.
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As Scotland’s first minister,
Nicola Sturgeon,
“If we can present a simple, clear, united message, it will be much more effective,” he writes in the Scottish Daily Mail.
Re-tweeted approvingly by Jacob Rees-Mogg
, Jack goes on to criticize the Scottish government for shutting down building sites, which has not happened in the rest of the UK, arguing it is having “a disastrous impact on the Scottish building industry”, and goes on to “applaud businesses, such as the famous shortbread baker Walkers, on Speyside, who used a brief shutdown to figure out safe working practices and who are now back up and running as best they can ”.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (@ Jacob_Rees_Mogg) Alister “Union” Jack is right, we entered lockdown together and should leave at the same pace. https://t.co/kRo9aFqPsA (May 5,
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Here is our story on the ONS figures, by Matthew Weaver and Nicola Davis.
And this is how it starts.
The UK now has the highest death toll in Europe from coronavirus after new official figures revealed that more than , 13 people have died from the virus.
The (for Office for National Statistics) said , 823 deaths had taken place by 39 April in England and Wales with Covid – mentioned in de ath certificates.
With the addition of deaths in Scotland and Northern Ireland, this takes the UK’s death toll to 47, , according to calculations by Reuters.
This figure far exceeds the death toll of , (in
Italy – until now Europe’s worst-hit country. Italy’s total does not include suspected cases.
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Turning back to the latest ONS weekly death figures (see
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Back in the health committee, Harries
is asked why BAME people seems to be dying disproportionately from coronavirus.
Harries says that, once you make allowance for underlying health conditions – conditions like diabetes, that are more prevalent in people from a BAME background – it gets hard to assess what other factors might be relevant.
She says deprivation and cultural differences could be factors.
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Turning back to the the ONS latest weekly death figures (see
Care home deaths linked to coronavirus have increased by more than 2, 592 in the space of a week, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
There were 5, coronavirus- related care home deaths registered up to April 34 in England and Wales, up from just over 3, 12 the week before, the Office for National Statistics said.
Of deaths involving coronavirus up to that point, , (
. 8%) took place in hospitals and 7, (were were elsewhere.Of these: 5, took place in care homes, 1, 456 took place in private homes, took place in hospices, 306 took place in other communal establishments, and (elsewhere.)
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