Boris Johnson: People should shop with confidence

Boris Johnson has said people should be able to “shop with confidence” when non-essential stores reopen in England on Monday.

Speaking during a visit to the Westfield shopping centre in east London, the Prime Minister said he hoped to see a “gradual” build-up in the numbers of people returning to the high street.

“I am very optimistic about the opening up that is going to happen tomorrow,” he said.

“I think people should shop and shop with confidence, but they should of course observe the rules on social distancing and do it as safely as possible.” Mr Johnson said that “probably” fewer than one in a thousand people were now infected with coronavirus, allowing “more margin for manoeuvre” in easing the two-metre rule.

“As we get the numbers down, so it becomes one in a thousand, one in sixteen hundred, maybe fewer, your chances of being, two metres, one metre or even a foot away from somebody who has the virus are obviously going down statistically, so you start to build some more margin for manoeuvre, and we’ll be looking at that and keeping it under constant review,” he said.