Afternoon summary Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has urged the government to speed up vaccine supplies to his region to allow it to run a “surge vaccination programme”. (See 2.58pm.) He spoke after the government announced that surge testing will be extended in Greater Manchester and Lancashire in response to the rise in Covid cases in those areas. The government news release with full details of the measures is here. The number of new Covid cases in the UK in the past week is now 60% up on the total for the previous week, the latest figures on the government’s dashboard show. (See 4.24pm.) Downing Street has accused the EU of taking a “purist approach” to implementing the Northern Ireland protocol. (See 1.53pm.) The briefing came as ministers were warned that tariffs and quotas could be slapped on some products by the EU if Boris Johnson overrides the Brexit deal in a trade dispute over the sale of sausages. Unions representing teachers and other school staff are calling on the government to reinstate masks in classrooms in England in response to a growing number of Covid outbreaks, particularly among secondary pupils. Conservative backbencher Steve Baker has urged the government to press ahead with lifting England’s remaining Covid restrictions on 21 June despite a sharp rise in cases. Edwin Poots, the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) leader, has named his party colleague Paul Givan as the next first minister of Northern Ireland. Ministers are acting like some African states who defy democracy by denying MPs the chance to vote on overseas aid cuts, former minister Andrew Mitchell has said. Dominic Cummings has failed to provide written evidence that he had promised to provide to a parliamentary inquiry to substantiate his allegations that senior cabinet ministers mishandled the coronavirus pandemic. Plans to allow an NHS system to extract patient data from doctors’ surgeries in England have been delayed amid concerns around privacy. That’s all from me for today. But our coronavirus coverage continues on our global live blog. It’s here. This is from Alastair McLellan, editor of the Health Service Journal. Weekly Covid cases up 60%, latest figures show, as UK records 6,048 new infections The UK has recorded 6,048 new coronavirus cases, according to the latest update to the government’s Covid dashboard. It is only the second time daily new cases have been above 6,000 since March. This means the total number of new cases over the past seven days is now 60.6% up on the total for the previous week. Yesterday the week-on-week increase was 52.9%. And the UK has also recorded 13 more deaths, with the seven-day death total up 67.4% on the total for the previous week. But because the daily death totals are so low, this figure tends to fluctuate quite considerably. Yesterday deaths were up just 1.7% week on week. On Sunday they were down week on week by 1.7%. In her speech to the Scottish parliament Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, also confirmed that if the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation did recommend vaccination for teenagers, the Scottish government would accept that recommendation. She told MSPs: The Scottish government is now awaiting advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation on the vaccination of children in those age groups. I’m sure everyone would agree that it is vital that we continue to rely on expert advice in all of our vaccination decisions. However, vaccination may very well be a really important way of giving children greater protection, minimising any further disruption to schooling, and also further reducing community transmission of the virus. And so I can confirm that if the JCVI does recommend the use of the vaccine for children aged 12 and over, we will move as quickly as practically possible to implement their advice. Yesterday Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said the JCVI advice on vaccinating teenagers would be available within weeks. Unlike Sturgeon, he did not commit the government to going ahead with vaccination for teenagers if the JCVI recommends it. He just said the government would “listen” to that advice. Theresa May condemns government cuts to aid budget In the Commons Theresa May, the Conservative former prime minister, has just finished speaking in the debate on cuts to the aid budget. She said she was opposed to the cuts for three reason. First, like all Conservative MPs, she stood on a manifesto saying the party was “proudly” committed to maintaining the target of spending 0.7% of national income on aid. She said she accepted that the Covid pandemic had hit government finances. But ministers are saying the economy will bounce back, she said. Second, she said she was particularly committed to tackling modern slavery, and she said the cuts would reduce funding for the global fund to tackle modern slavery by 80%. One impact of that would be to cut the money available to combat the commercial sexual exploitation of children, she said. And, third, she said the cuts would damage the UK’s standing in the world. Bill Crothers, the former government chief commercial officer who became an adviser to Greensill Capital while still working as a civil servant has insisted there was no conflict of interest, PA Media reports. PA says: Crothers told MPs on the public administration and constitutional affairs committee that his intention was to follow the rules “in spirit and in form” when appointed to Lex Greensill’s collapsed financial services firm. Links between Greensill Capital, the government and David Cameron have come under scrutiny amid controversy over the former prime minister’s lobbying on behalf of the firm. Crothers began advising Greensill in September 2015 but remained in his civil service role until November that year, after which he carried on working for the financial services firm. The businessman told MPs: “My intention was to completely follow the rules, in spirit and in form. I was transparent in all that I did and no conflict happened.” Crothers, who had a long career at Accenture before moving to Whitehall, said it was always his intention to return to the private sector and that he had expressed this to colleagues. He said that after eight years in the civil service, his initial plan was to leave the position of chief commercial officer and immediately contract back as an adviser, while also becoming an adviser with Greensill. But Crothers said that the Whitehall ethics chief at the time, Sue Gray, advised that it would be more appropriate instead to become a part-time civil servant while taking on the Greensill role. “In the press, the phrase ‘double-hatting’ has been used, and I just feel that is not appropriate - this was a transitional arrangement,” he told MPs. Plans to allow an NHS system to extract patient data from doctors’ surgeries in England have been delayed amid concerns around privacy, PA Media reports. Mass gatherings of thousands of Euro 2020 fans in Glasgow will go ahead, despite an increase in cases of 50% across Scotland in the past week alone. Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s health secretary, told MSPs this afternoon that, while he understood concerns about the fan zones, where up to 6,000 people a day can gather to watch the matches on Glasgow Green and testing is not mandatory, this would be an “outdoor, highly regulated space”. He added that people attending were being encouraged to take lateral flow tests in advance, and that permission for the events could be withdrawn at the last moment if the situation changed. Significant concerns have been raised about these gatherings since Glasgow came out of nine months’ of lockdown restrictions only last weekend, with hospitality groups warning that businesses will not survive a further tightening of rules if cases rise again. Making her weekly Covid statement immediately after Yousaf spoke, Nicola Sturgeon said that there was “encouraging evidence” that the length of time people were spending in hospital with Covid was reducing. She also announced that more than half of the adult population in Scotland has now had two doses. She said: Just as we all hoped, vaccination may well be giving us more scope to ease restrictions, and reduce the social, economic and wider health harms that the response to the virus so far has caused. The statements took place as owners of soft play centres protested outside the parliament and threatened legal action over restrictions which mean these centres must remain closed in many parts of the country. Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross also raised perceived inconsistencies around limits on numbers at weddings, christenings and funerals, as well as parents of children moving up to primary school not being allowed to attend nursery graduation ceremonies this month. He compared all these restrictions with the fan zones going ahead without mandatory testing. Sturgeon said that such decisions required judgement as well as clinical advice and the ability to sometimes say things people didn’t want to hear. She said that the particular characteristics of soft play centres, being indoors, meant they did still pose a risk, but that these businesses could open once areas have moved into level 1, which some did last weekend. In the Commons Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative former international development secretary, is now opening the emergency debate on the cuts to the aid budget. He started by praising the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, for his call yesterday for MPs to get a binding vote on the cuts. It was one of the strongest statements he had heard from a Speaker, he said. Mitchell also said that he would not be pushing for a vote today because, like the Speaker, he wants a binding vote. The government would be able to ignore any vote today, and the motion is a neutral one anyway (“that this house has considered the matter of the 0.7% official development assistance target”). He also said that although he and other Tories opposed to the aid cuts had been described as “rebels”, it was in fact the government who were the “rebels” because they were the ones defying the Tory manifesto pledge not to cut aid spending. Burnham calls for jab supplies to Greater Manchester to be speeded up so it can run "surge vaccination programme" At his press conference Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, urged the government to speed up vaccine supplies to his region to allow it to run a “surge vaccination programme”. Referring to the measures announced by Matt Hancock earlier (see 12.38pm), Burnham said: Obviously what we’re seeing here is a localised approach to messaging, more localised support on testing and on tracing and isolation. We are also saying that also should apply to vaccination. We are not asking for any more vaccine here than our fair share, what we are asking for is the bringing forward of Greater Manchester’s supplies so that we can run a surge vaccination programme over the next three weeks. Burnham said accelerating vaccinations would “allow us to go further and faster in those areas where we need to drive the take-up, where those case rates are highest”. He said that if Greater Manchester could get more vaccine doses, “we are very confident that we will have the tools that we need to turn the rising cases around”. He went on: And that’s not just about protecting Greater Manchester, it is of course about protecting the whole country from the wider spread of the Delta variant. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has been holding a press conference. He said that, although Greater Manchester is now one of the Covid hotspots where the government is advising people to minimise travel in and out (see 12.30pm), this was “not a lockdown” and not a travel ban. For more detail on what he said, there is good coverage on the Manchester Evening News’s live blog. On Radio 4’s The World at One Eamonn O’Brien, the Labour leader of Bury council, said that the surge testing for the Greater Manchester area announced today (see 12.38pm) should have come sooner. He told the programme: I’m a little bit disappointed it hasn’t come sooner. We have been discussing this as a request for some weeks now and obviously we’ve seen it work in Bolton. So we were very keen on making as quick a start as possible in other parts of Greater Manchester, especially my borough of Bury because it neighbours Bolton. We would like to see a commitment that we get our vaccination supply bought forward so we can vaccinate far more people as quickly as possible which is of course one of the best ways we’ve got at the moment to protect people from any new variants and any surge that we’re seeing.