Sadiq Khan warns against splitting London into different post-lockdown tiers
25 November 2020, 18:59
Sadiq Khan calls for London to enter Tier 2 "as one" after lockdown
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has warned against putting different London boroughs under different Covid tiers when lockdown ends next week.
His warning comes as a new tiered system will be introduced after lockdown at a regional level, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson warning "many more" areas face the toughest tiers.
Pubs, bars and restaurants face continued closures in the new system, but all shops, gyms and places of worship can reopen fully again.
Mr Khan told LBC's Shelagh Fogarty: "If you remember, we as one went into Tier 2 early before lockdown happened and was announced by the Prime Minister.
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"All the numbers indicate that in relation to 19 boroughs the virus is going down. In the other boroughs there's dip in the increase.
"We'e got plenty of headroom in the NHS, plenty of headroom in ventilator beds. And so we've been lobbying the Government to go into Tier 2.
"I'm afraid the numbers aren't good enough for us to go into Tier 1, but the numbers are nowhere [near] bad enough for us to go into Tier 3.
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"So what we're doing is trying to say to the Government it's really important that we go into Tier 2 [and] we go as one.
"Even though [in] some boroughs the numbers aren't as good as we'd like, we want to go as one London."
The Mayor of London argued that "the idea of enforcing different boroughs [and] the idea of having different transport systems and having different rules and confusion would be nonsensical".
