Newcastle's Covid era leader doubts public would lockdown again

BBC News

23-03-2025

The man who helped lead the North East's response to the Covid pandemic believes the public would be far less willing to follow similar restrictions again.As the fifth anniversary of the first Covid lockdown is marked, Nick Forbes, who led Newcastle Council between 2011 and 2022, said he was proud of the way the region responded in the first months of the outbreak.But he also said he fears the government handling of the crisis and its politicisation, had undermined the response that made the initial 2020 lockdown effective.He said there had been "scepticism" that the message to reduce social contact would be "taken seriously", but that it had been in the region.
"They acted to protect their families, their neighbours and the NHS," Forbes, who was also the Labour group leader of the Local Government Association, said."Looking back, one of the things I am most struck by is what a sense of collective responsibility people in the region had. "Sadly that wasn't reflected by some of the actions going on in government at the time."
'We dreaded Fridays'
Forbes says public unity fractured when the government began to impose regional restrictions which often confused local leaders and the public."The later ones when we started to get into arguments about tiers and different restrictions for different parts of the country got ever more chaotic and confusing and undermined the whole concept of acting as a nation," he said."We used to dread Fridays because we knew that was when the government would announce which areas of the country were going to face restrictions for the coming week. Often the announcement was made before we knew the details."Of course the council was then flooded with people asking what it meant. Could they get married? Could they go to funerals?"
Forbes said he set up communication between Number 10 and the region's council leaders to try and get an early warning of the announcements.But he said he sensed unity ebbing away, making it less likely that the public would be as willing to tolerate any future lockdown.He added: "I felt lockdowns and restrictions getting more political as the pandemic went on. "I could feel it as people started to protest about it and it became an issue of identity and free speech as much as public health and safety."And I worry now whether, particularly given the chaotic nature of the government's approach at the time, we would still have the national ability to respond in quite such a collective way without that politics getting in the way of what we would need to do to keep each other safe."When lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020, large parts of the economy also had to shut down. Government support through loans and furlough helped businesses survive, but there remains a hangover.
Ollie Vaulkhard heads a group which runs more than a dozen bars and venues across the North East."Hospitality today is still burdened with huge debt from that time," he said. "We, as a company, won't recover our balance sheet from the impact of Covid for probably another three or four years."People left the industry, but there have been changes big and small. Nobody stands in bars anymore and people use credit cards not cash."He believes the government's response to the pandemic was wrong."The NHS has challenges, many people died of Covid, many businesses went to the wall, government debt is at an all-time high. "That seems a really big price to pay."
Worsening mental health
A price was also paid by young people. Lockdowns designed to protect older and vulnerable people saw schools, colleges and universities shut. Durham University interviewed young people in the North East about their experiences.Researcher Dr Hannah King said young people felt isolated and experienced social anxiety. "In the last 20 years young people in our society have gone from having the lowest level of reported symptoms of mental health, like anxiety and depression, to having the highest levels," she said."What happened is that the pandemic intensified those difficulties and those inequalities, making it much worse for young people now."She believes that might make it harder to persuade young people to make sacrifices again.She said: "Young people were very much missed out of the debate, but the irony might not have been lost on them. "While they were being portrayed as party-going super-spreaders, and the health secretary of the time was on the radio saying: 'don't kill your granny', members of the government were breaking those rules."
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