Led by the Chairman of the Stockport Economic Alliance and CEO of musicMagpie and supported by Stockport’s Business Improvement District and Marketing Stockport, the Stockport business community are united in their frustration and anger in the re-assigning criteria of the Tier system this coming Wednesday following the end of the current enforced lockdown period.
This morning, the group has issued a joint letter to Alok Sharma, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and called upon support from Stockport’s four local MPs to back their plea to adopt a more localised approach. `
The group strongly believe that Stockport along with all local council boroughs, should be judged on their current status in regard to Covid-19 and the 5 measures taken into consideration by Government when assigning the Tiers, rather than take a more blanket, regional approach.
They are collectively calling for greater clarification on the evidence used as there are a large number of inconsistencies, particularly when comparing the North and the South of the UK. There are currently 23 areas with a higher infection rate than Stockport that will be moving into Tier 2; cases in Stockport have been falling consistently over the past 4 weeks to 174.8 and current latest data records an R rate 0.629, one of the lowest in the UK; hospital admissions have continued to fall while infection rates among the over 60s is 104.1 per 100,000.
If places like Stratford were bumped up a tier because of high risk in surrounding areas, why was inner London not bumped up to tier 3 where parts of outer London appear to belong? The effect of these blanket policy decisions will be to level down the economies across our critical business community and we are calling upon Ministers to review the regional approach and assign a more local borough-led approach with immediate effect given the pressing nature of peak season trading.
Please find below a copy of the letter sent to Alok Sharma MP, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
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