UK coronavirus live: Met chief calls for local exercise rules to be clarified after row about PM’s cycle ride | Politics

The Department for Education has announced that a further 300,000 laptops and tablets will be delivered to schools in England to help disadvantaged pupils learn at home.

Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, said: “These additional devices, on top of the 100,000 delivered last week, add to the significant support we are making available to help schools deliver high-quality online learning, as we know they have been doing.”

More than one third of people feel closer to their local community as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, a survey suggests. PA Media says almost 70% of people said they feel part of their locality, and 35% said Covid has boosted this sense of belonging, according to a poll of 7,000 Britons by market researcher Opinium.

Tesco has become the latest supermarket to ban customers who refuse to wear a face covering without a medical exemption, following in the footsteps of Morrisons and Sainsbury’s. In a statement, a Tesco spokesperson said:

To protect our customers and colleagues, we won’t let anyone into our stores who is not wearing a face covering, unless they are exempt in line with government guidance.

We are also asking our customers to shop alone, unless they’re a carer or with children.

To support our colleagues, we will have additional security in stores to help manage this.

And here are the latest coronavirus figures for Scotland announced by Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, at her news conference.

• Sturgeon said there were 1,717 Covid patients in hospital, up 53 from yesterday. That is well above the figure for the peak of the first wave, when hospital numbers were just over 1,500 at their highest.

• She said that there had been 1,875 more positive cases, and that 12% of tests were positive. She said the case numbers appeared to be stabilising. This chart, from the Scottish government’s dashboard, illustrates this point.

• She said there had been 54 further deaths.

• She said that 175,942 people had received their first dose of vaccine.

Military helicopters could be used within days to airlift coronavirus patients from the Isle of Wight, the island’s medical director has said, after an “astronomical” rise in infections fuelled by mixing and visitors over Christmas. My colleague Josh Halliday has the story here.

Marcus Rashford has condemned free school meal packages being sent to some children and families learning from home as “unacceptable”, my colleague Lucy Campbell reports.

Rashford posted a further thread on this on Twitter this morning, following a conversation he had had with Chartwells, the company said to have provided the one of the food parcels that triggered his original comments. It starts here.

Rashford said one problem with the government scheme was that only lunches were being provided.

Police Federation leaders have joined the Met police commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, in calling for the rules on exercising in England during the lockdown to be clarified. (See 10.04am.)

Brian Booth, chairman of the West Yorkshire Police Federation, told PA Media:

The guidance is that you should be local in your own community near where you live but people are far exceeding that. Officers have no power in law to deal with it, so it is a bit of a nonsense really.

The guidance is people’s moral judgment, should they be doing it, but with regard to policing it – it’s impossible.

Booth said the law should be more specific.

If you say to people you are going to limit their civil liberties, and you are going to place them in lockdown, state it very clearly. Because it’s not fair on the public either.

Don’t expect officers to work a miracle and pull law out of their back pocket. We’ve got to have a sound foundation of law to apply properly. If not, the public starts to mistrust us.

And Adam Commons, chairman of Leicestershire Police Federation, said officers were “trying to interpret something that’s incredibly vague and needs amending”. He said:

This just puts the pressure back on my colleagues who then get the criticism in the media for enforcing it and then if it’s wrong or interpreted differently it is used as a stick to beat them with.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, will take the No 10 press conference at 5pm this afternoon, No 10 has said.

In the Commons Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, asked Matt Hancock for an assurance that no hospital will run out of oxygen in the next few weeks. Yesterday Boris Johnson admitted that in some places hospitals are running short of oxygen.

But Hancock told MPs there was no national oxygen shortage. He said:

I can assure [Ashworth] that there is no constraint that we are anywhere near on the national availability of oxygen … oxygenated beds.

It does mean, as he knows and as we’ve seen reported, that sometimes we have to move patients to a different part of the … as local as possible, but occasionally across the country to make sure they get the treatment that they need.

In the House of Commons Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has just defended the use of lateral flow tests.

He was responding to a question from the SNP MP Neal Hanvey. Hanvey did not mention the new concerns raised by Prof Jon Deeks (see 12.05pm), but he said he was concerned about the government relying on them when they produce misleading results.

But Hancock said lateral flow tests were “incredibly important” because they allowed officials to identify asymptomatic cases that would not otherwise come to light. He went on:

One in three people have this disease without knowing it and finding those positive cases helps us to break the chains of transmission.