Thread by @AdamWagner1

Quick thoughts:
The PM’s announcement brings the government guidance more into line with the law as set out in the lockdown regulations. Now no limit on exercise as there never was in the English/Scottish/Northern Irish laws....

... PM said:
“You can sit in the sun in your local park, you can drive to other destinations, you can even play sports but only with members of your own household.”
Suggests each of these activities should now unambiguously be ‘reasonable excuses’ within the meaning of the law

... and police should no longer be giving fines or arresting people for doing any of those things. Good as these were areas of real confusion becuase of conflict between guidance and law.

2. Encouraging people to go to work if they can’t work from home - this was already the guidance and the law but now should be clearer for people?

3. Compulsory quarantine for people entering UK will be interesting. Devil will be in detail but big question is how it will be enforced & whether it will amount to a deprivation of liberty under human rights law. Doubt it will be in a locked room but may be checked on by police

4. Will be interesting to see whether the legal regulations are amended. I have a feeling they will not be except maybe with small tweaks, the big changes should come in the coming weeks as/if the lockdown is properly relaxed

5. I was very interested that there was no mention, as far as I heard, of the contact tracing app which is supposedly a crucial plank in the easing of the lockdown strategy. What is going on? Is it that they have had to go back to the drawing board? Or just an oversight?

6. Appreciate it’s fashionable on my timeline to say the govt has screwed up the messaging but I have some sympathy. There is a huge tension between sending simple messages which can be put on billboards to be digested by 10s of millions of people and at the same time...

... provide enough fine-grained detail to allow people to understand what they are and are not allowed to do in there almost infinitely varied lives. I have been following the development of the guidance and laws very closely and I have criticised the unnecessary...

... conflicts and contradictions between the guidance and the laws, and the conflicts between what ministers say are the rules and what the rules actually are (and the guidance!). However, since around a month ago at the apex of what I consider to be the confusion period...

... things have improved, the online guidance is better organised and easier to find, the police have worked hard to provide their own guidance which is very well done to ensure that as many offices as possible understand their very complicated new powers and duties...

... the government has provided updates every day in a way which the public can access. I appreciate it is by no means perfect, in fact in lots of ways it has been deficient, but it’s difficult to emphasise what a challenge the public communications aspect of this has been...

... and I think some credit should go to the army of civil servants and other public servants who have been working to make things digestible at the same time as put in place laws and schemes to protect people. Anyway, enough praise, back to constructive criticism!

I say the above as a lawyer who has tried his hand at public communications, explanation and education. It is just so hard. Everybody thinks they can do it but when you start testing it you realise almost nobody can, and the people who think they can are making things worse.

There is this guy who works in number 10 who apparently is a total genius at this… 👿😉

7. The law has not changed in relation to public gatherings and it sounds like the guidance hasn’t either. This means it is still *illegal* to participate in a gathering, in a public place, of more than 2 people not from your household legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/…