We must stay alert.
We must continue to control the virus and save lives.
The very gradual easing of the UK's nationwide lockdown
is beginning, but this is a perilous process for Boris
Johnson and his government.
People in England are allowed to leave their homes
as much as they want, to go and exercise in a park
as freely as possible.
They can also go and meet one friend
in a socially-distanced manner.
But Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland
have taken a different approach.
They're continuing to maintain those strict social-distancing
measures after disagreeing with Mr Johnson's approach here.
The government in Westminster wants
to give Britions a little bit more freedom,
to allow them outside their house
but also crucially to try and get the nation back to work.
Their aggressive message which was to stay at home to protect
lives and save the NHS, was, in some ways, too successful.
Too many Britons stayed home, and the economy
has ground to a halt.
But the government wants to get people back
to work because the economic cost of that lockdown
is growing all the time.
It wants to try and do so in an approach that maintains
social distancing measures, the sort of thing
we've seen in countries like Sweden.
I can announce today that the job retention
scheme will be extended for four months,
until the end of October.
But the cost of that shutdown was made clear this week
when Rishi Sunak announced the furloughing scheme would
continue, where the government will pay 80 per cent of wages
for millions of Britons.
The idea being that the alternative, mass unemployment,
is much worse.
But from August, Mr Sunak says that employers
will start to have to pay the costs themselves,
with the government tapering off how much it's going to pay.
Because the cost to public funds with that
scheme is extraordinary.
The government is aware, the longer
this goes on the longer the pain on the other side
to try and have to pay for this.
We've been through the initial peak,
but it's coming down the mountain
that is often more dangerous.
The second stage, which will begin
at the earliest at the beginning of June,
will try and get even more people out of their homes
and back to work.
Non-essential shops will open up once again,
and more public transport will be running.
People will be encouraged to get out and work and be as
productive as much as possible.
But not until the third stage hits,
until July, would that be actually possible.
That's when things like hairdressers, the hospitality
industry will be open again with restaurants and hotels opening.
But that could still come much later in the summer.
There could be no greater mistake
than to jeopardise everything we've
striven to achieve by proceeding too far and too fast.
We will be driven not by hope or economic revival
as an end in itself, but by data and science and public health.
Throughout this process the government
has said it has been guided by the science about how and where
it can ease the lockdown.
But the fact is these decisions are political and economic
in their nature.
How and when to ease the lockdown
is taking decisions about where they
can get economic activity moving as quickly as possible.
The big risk for Mr Johnson is seen
that he is helping those white-collar workers who
can work at home safely, people like journalists,
in fact, whereas allowing those people at the lower
end of the economic spectrum, the UK's key workers,
to go back to work where they are much more likely to pick up
coronavirus.
If you're a bus driver, a nurse, or working in a shop,
you can't work from home.
And when the second and third phase
of the easing of the lockdown begins the prime minister has
to make sure that those people are protected,
they feel safe and secure.
Otherwise, a big political backlash awaits.
Mr Johnson's ratings have been very
high throughout the coronavirus crisis
with big levels of public support for everything
he's doing.
He'll want to maintain that and make
sure he doesn't move too fast and put
too many Britons in danger.
And most importantly of all, he won't
want to see the coronavirus spread out of control again
and that death toll increase and the NHS collapse.