Lockdown easing measures are being postponed in Blackburn with Darwen

The Government has announced that further lockdown easing measures are being postponed in Blackburn with Darwen.

The Council had already decided to delay the re-opening of our leisure centres, pools and gyms until we were confident the number of cases had reduced further and stabilised.

To support the Council’s actions, Government has now announced that further lockdown easing measures are being postponed in Blackburn with Darwen, and also in Luton.

It is important to stress that Blackburn with Darwen is not going into local lockdown and this is different to the interventions in Leicester. In fact, these measures are intended to prevent this from happening.

A full list of the affected settings is available on the gov.uk website, but this includes indoor gyms and other indoor sporting centres that were due to reopen from this Saturday 25^th July and casinos, bowling alleys, skating rinks and conference venues that were due to reopen from 1^st August.

We appreciate this will be disappointing for businesses and residents and we are also working with government on making additional support available.

Cllr Mohammed Khan, Leader of Blackburn with Darwen Council:

“We are very grateful to our communities for working with us. The increase in testing is helping to ensure that we are heading in the right direction with a reduction in positive cases and hospital admissions.

“We need to keep up the momentum with our strong prevention work so we agree its sensible not to relax the easing of restrictions at the moment to stop the spread.

“We have already decided to delay the opening of our council leisure facilities along with introducing other localised prevention measures.  We feel that accelerating our control measures in this way will assist us to move out of having higher COVID rates even faster- we are grateful for the Government’s help in our local plans on this”