I made the following statement at the press briefing on 22nd April.
As Nikki made clear on Monday, we are currently in a good place, the curve has been squashed and that means we are ready to begin our exit strategy.
Our approach to that exit strategy is 3 fold – firstly testing, contact tracing and quarantine, secondly a phased easing of restrictions and, if necessary, thirdly, adaptive triggering.
Nikki will continue to keep everyone up to date on our approach to testing over the coming weeks.
I will focus on the changes that have been approved by the Committee for Health & Social Care yesterday and that will come into effect from Saturday. These represent what we hope will be just the beginning of a gradual easing of restrictions before we end lockdown.
Saturday isn’t about a big bang change. The core message remains ‘stay at home.’ We have been successful in flattening the curve by reducing contact between members of different households and this focus must remain. What we are doing instead is looking at areas which can resume some level of activity without presenting undue risk to the community.
This means that we have carefully considered which businesses have the potential to operate in accordance with Public Health advice and won’t disproportionately increase risk to the Bailiwick.
So, with effect from Saturday, the additional businesses able to operate under specific conditions will be:-
- Gardening, building and other trades with no household contact;
- building wholesale and supply;
- Vehicle servicing, maintenance and repairs (including cars, bikes and marine); and
- Property sales, rentals and business transactions
There are specific requirements being placed on those businesses as to how many people they will be able to have on-site and how they will be expected to arrange their premises taking into account social distancing and hygiene requirements.
Additionally, the new guidance also outlines changes in relation to the number of employees allowed to carry out non-essential work on office premises, subject to meeting social distancing and hygiene requirements.
Any business falling within these categories and that wishes to operate from 25 April 2020 must register that they wish to do by notifying Environmental Health via www.gov.gg/covid19businessnotification.
This isn’t about process – it’s about protection for businesses, for employees and the community. The practical steps which businesses will need to take have been designed to be as simple, straightforward and automated as possible. Where businesses experience difficulties, and I make no apologies for this, is if they seek to circumvent the restrictions in place or if they seek to pressurise staff to work at this time.
Guidance on reporting breaches will be on www.gov.gg/coronavirus by end of play today. People can call the number 717118 which is manned by our team not the police or use covid19enquiries@gov.gg
As I said at the start, the phased easing of restrictions is just one of 3 elements to our exit strategy. As we have spoken about previously, the third aspect is adaptive triggering. Should we find that the number of cases give us cause for concern, for a variety of reasons such as the level of community seeding, then we will not hesitate to tighten up the restrictions again.
However, hopefully that won’t be necessary and we can continue on a smooth path to the eventual end of lockdown.
Finally I’d like to cover off a couple of other areas. Firstly, the commercial and household green waste facilities will be opened up from the beginning of next week and details will be provided. We will also be issuing guidance on which recreational activities can be undertaken. There have been a lot of questions about this, and various suggestions as to how some forms of recreation could be undertaken so we think it’s worth putting out some more detailed guidance on that front. Just like for businesses, our decisions will be based on evidence and taking account the wider risk to the community.