UK Covid live news: cases rates rising in England’s secondary schools, latest ONS figures show

And here are some more lines from the Downing Street lobby briefing.

• The PM’s spokesman said that the government was making “steady progress to ease [travel] restrictions” and he confirmed a further announcement is coming this afternoon.

• He said the PM has not yet decide whether Chevening, the grace-and-favour country home traditionally allocated to the foreign secretary, would go do Liz Truss or Dominic Raab, the former foreign secretary she replaced who is now deputy PM.

Pounds and ounces are an easily understood and widely used unit of measurement. This is one small part of a wide-ranging drive across government to establish the right regulatory environment to support jobs and growth across the UK.

• The spokesman would not comment on the leak of a recording showing Kemi Badenoch referring to trans women as men before she became equalities minister. The story has been published by Vice. The spokesman said he had not spoken to the PM about this. But he went on:

The minister for equalities is working hard to deliver for LGBT people, whether that’s modernising the process of applying for a gender recognition certificate, driving forward LGBT rights in the workplace or banning conversion therapy.

Another government spokesperson told Vice that Badenoch’s comment had been taken out of context. But Labour has said the comments are “disgusting”. This is from the party’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner.

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, has confirmed he will announce changes to Covid travel restrictions later today.

The number of European Union nationals who are living in the UK has fallen, figures show. As PA Media reports, ONS data for 2020 shows that within a year, the population of EU nationals in the UK dropped by 200,000, from 3.7 million to 3.5 million.

At cabinet this morning Boris Johnson told his ministers they had “a record of getting things done”, Downing Street said. Summing up what happened at cabinet, the prime minister’s spokesperson said:

The prime minister opened cabinet by congratulating members on their appointments, saying he was delighted to have such a strong team in place to build back better from the pandemic and deliver on the priorities of the public.

He set out that this government has a record of getting things done, including delivering on Brexit and taking on one of the most difficult questions that has bedevilled British governments for decades through the health and care levy which will fix the social care system and enable our NHS to bounce back from the pandemic.

The spokesman said ministers were also given a briefing by Emily Lawson, head of No 10’s delivery unit. The spokesman said: “Cabinet agreed that shared data would be vital to this work, enabling ministers and the public to clearly see what progress is being made on each challenge.”

I will post more from the briefing soon.

The Office for National Statistics has published its latest weekly Covid infection survey. This is seen as one of the most reliable guides to the prevalence of Covid in the community because these figures are based on the results from an extensive, representative sample, not just the results from people who have chosen to get a test.

Here are the new figures for the ONS’s estimate of how many people in each country in the UK would have tested positive in the week ending Saturday 11 September

England

Covid rate: 1 in 80 people

Trend: “Uncertain”, the ONS says. Last week it gave the rate for England as 1 in 70 people, which implies an improvement this week, but the ONS is always cautious because its figures are estimates within a range.

Wales

Covid rate: 1 in 60

Trend: Covid rate continuing to increase, the ONS says. Last week it was 1 in 65.

Northern Ireland

Covid rate: 1 in 75

Trend: Covid rate decreasing, the ONS says. Last week it was 1 in 60.

Scotland

Covid rate: 1 in 45

Trend: Covid rate increasing, but the rate of increase has slowed, the ONS says. Last week it also put the Covid rate at 1 in 45.

All the ONS figures are central estimates. The 95% credible interval figures, showing the wider range within which the true figure is likely to be, are in the ONS report.

Keir Starmer is being urged to hold a summit next week with some of his leftwing critics in the Labour party to stop a bitter row about expulsions destabilising conference.

The proposal has come from John McDonnell, shadow chancellor when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. McDonnell claims that Labour is haemorrhaging party members because Starmer is alienating the left.

In an interview with the BBC, McDonnell focused in particular on the consequences of Labour’s decision to ban members of four far-left factions, although this is by no means the only grievance that the left have with Starmer.

The Labour annual conference is starting next weekend, and the left are pushing for a vote that could in theory lead to the removal of the general secretary, David Evans.

McDonnell told the BBC that Starmer would hold a meeting with his critics next week to try to address some of their concerns. He said:

The best thing that Keir and David Evans can do is get people round the table, accept there are grievances that have to be addressed. To be frank he [Starmer] lacks an element of political experience. He hasn’t been in politics that long. He needs to talk to people across the political spectrum in the party and engage more.

McDonnell claimed people were being expelled unfairly. He said:

What’s happened is a number of groups have been proscribed and we are now receiving reports of large numbers of members of the party being excluded from the party on the basis of statements or retweeting something from one of these groups before they were proscribed.

This flies in the face of natural justice … It is like being guilty of pre-crime.

McDonnell said that the party was now “losing members hand over fist” because people did not feel welcome. Asked how serious this problem was, he replied:

My understanding is we have lost at least 100,000 members so far. If you start losing that mass membership, we are undermining our ability to fight elections – which is appalling.

Labour has been asked for a response. I will post one when I get it.

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader, has criticised the Irish president, Michael Higgins, for deciding not to attend a church service in Armagh next month to mark the centenary of partition and the creation of Northern Ireland.

The Queen is attending, but Higgins has said that the title of the event – saying it will “mark the centenaries of the partition of Ireland and the formation of Northern Ireland” – made it political. He also objected to being referred to in the invitation as president of the Republic of Ireland, not president of Ireland.

Donaldson told Radio Ulster this morning:

The president has made his position clear but I have to say I’m very surprised – I really thought that the president would have risen above the politics of all of this.

He uses language that, I think, is unfortunately retrograde. He talks about being the president of Ireland, not the president of the Republic of Ireland, despite the fact that people voted to remove the territorial claim over Northern Ireland and that there was recognition in the constitution of the Republic of Ireland of the existence of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom.

I think the language used by the president is not forward-looking and doesn’t recognise the reality that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. It’s back to the old days when the president believes that he is president of the whole island, which we all know he is not.

I have to say that the comments made by President Higgins really are not conducive towards reconciliation.

According to PA Media, Boris Johnson made a joke about the large number of children he has had as he lectured his new cabinet on the importance of delivery. He told his ministers:

I want to thank you all because you’re all here on your merits because you’ve worked incredibly hard, but I want you to work even harder now.

I’m just thinking about delivery, I’ve seen a few delivery rooms, probably seen as many delivery rooms as anybody in this… Apart from the exception of Jacob [Rees-Mogg].

I know that delivery normally involves a superhuman effort by at least one person in the room. But there are plenty of other people in that room who are absolutely indispensable to that successful outcome.

Johnson has at least six children, although refuses to say exactly how many he has, and there is speculation there could be more. His wife, Carrie, is pregnant with their second child. Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, also has six children.

At cabinet Johnson was sitting with Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, to his right and Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, to his left. Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy PM, sat opposite Johnson, alongside Liz Truss, the new foreign secretary, and Michael Gove, the new housing secretary.

Last week, after the government announced its £12bn tax hike to fund the NHS and social care, a YouGov poll put Labour in the lead for the first time this year after the Tories saw their support fall five points in a week.

It has not lasted. As the Times’ Patrick Maguire reports, the latest YouGov poll shows Conservative support more or less back to where it was.

Sarah Jones, the shadow Home Office minister, told Sky News this morning that Labour had been “calling for ages” for ministers to scrap the amber travel list because it is poorly understood by the public. She said:

We want travel to open up as safely and as quickly as possible.

We’ve been calling for ages for the amber list to be scrapped, which has been touted in the papers today, because it always added to confusion – people never quite understood what the system was.

And we’ve been calling for a proper process to work out an international vaccine passport so we can get people safely moving around.

Asked if Labour favoured getting rid of PCR tests for fully vaccinated people arriving in the UK, she said:

I think we need to make it simpler, we need to make it clearer. People have been confused about what the rules are, they have been paying extortionate prices – we need to see what the government is going to suggest and hopefully it will be based on evidence and, if it is, then we will support them.

Boris Johnson opened this morning’s cabinet meeting by giving his ministers what he described as a “half-time pep talk”, PA Media reports. He told them:

This is, if you like, the half-time pep talk.

This is the moment when we spit out the orange peel, we adjust our gum shields and our scrum caps.

And we get out on to the pitch in the knowledge that we’re going to have to do it together and we’re going to have to do it as a team.

Good morning. Boris Johnson is chairing the first meeting of his new cabinet this morning. We are expecting to see some video footage from it, although whether Johnson gets his ministers to chant his dishonest “40 new hospitals” slogan, as he did when the cabinet first met after the 2019 election, remains to be seen.

And later we are expecting an important announcement about Covid travel rules. My colleague Aubrey Allegretti has a preview.

In an interview this morning George Eustice, the environment secretary, confirmed that a decision was imminent. He told Sky News:

My understanding is that no decisions have actually been taken yet, although I understand there may be a meeting today to review this. We regularly review those travel restrictions.

Obviously we took an important step earlier this summer when we removed the need to quarantine for those countries coming from amber list countries – that was a really big step forward – but we have retained the need for testing, and that’s really so we can pick up any variants of concern through that PCR test.

But, look, I know this has been raised by the travel industry, that they think some of that testing may be unnecessary, may be onerous – the government will be listening to that and the Covid subcommittee of cabinet that decide these things will be considering that probably later today.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Boris Johnson chairs a meeting of his new cabinet.

11.15am: Downing Street holds its daily lobby briefing.

12pm: The ONS publishes its weekly Covid infection survey.

Lunchtime: Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister, holds a press conference.

Afternoon: The government is due to announce changes to the Covid travel rules.

2pm: Mark Pack, the Lib Dem president, gives a speech opening the party’s online conference. Alistair Carmichael, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, speaks at 3.15pm.

Also in Chorley Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker (and local MP), is hosting the G7 Speakers conference today.

For more Covid coverage, do read our global live blog.

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