Three in four Britons believe there will a second lockdown this year, Peston poll reveals

10/4/2020 of cyclists making their way past a taped off bench on the sea front on Bournemouth beach.
Three quarters of Britons think there will be a second lockdown in 2020. Credit: PA

Three quarters of people polled believe there will be a second coronavirus lockdown in 2020, a new survey for ITV's Peston has revealed - and the majority would blame the public for a second wave. 

Of those polled almost half (48%) said they expected a second spike in the virus to hit in winter, leading to another nationwide lockdown, with 87% believing there will be serious damage to the economy - while six in ten people thought there would be further disorder on Britain's streets in the next six months.

And despite pubs and restaurants in England being allowed to open from Saturday, 70% of those polled think they will have to close again later in the year.

Dominic Raab speaking to Robert Peston Credit: ITV

The poll of 2,000 people by JL Partners found that six in ten said they would blame a second wave on the public for flouting lockdown rules.

The majority of parents believe children will be able to return to school by September. This comes ahead of an expected announcement by education secretary Gavin Williamson on Thursday that will set out the government’s road map to get children back in the classroom. Of those parents polled, 64% said the plans was achievable, while 14% said it was unlikely to happen. 

According to the exclusive survey for ITV ’s Peston, only one in seven (13%) think they will go on a holiday abroad this summer, with 32 percent saying they expect to take a UK 'staycation'.

Speaking on ITV’s Peston foreign secretary Dominic Raab said local flare ups would be mitigated if people followed the guidance, which would allow the country to “get back to some sort of normality”.

Britons were polled for an exclusive survey for ITV's Peston Credit: ITV

The foreign secretary was also asked about the situation in Hong Kong on the day a controversial security law was enforced by China.

The government have offered up to three million Hong Kong residents the chance to settle in the UK and ultimately apply for citizenship

But Mr Raab admitted there was little the British government could do if China tried to block Hong Kong Chinese people from coming to the UK.

"Well, there's of course all of the international diplomacy that we're engaged in, but ultimately if they follow through on something like that, there would be little that we could do to force them, to coercively force them,” the foreign secretary told ITV News political editor Robert Peston. 

But he said he believed China was “sensitive to the damage it's doing to its reputation.”

“I wouldn't want to be naive about this, I think we need to be realistic, but I do think China as a rising leading member of the international community is sensitive to the reputational risk in all of this. But clearly not sufficiently that it hasn't proceeded anyway."

He said it was “difficult to give precise forecasts” as to how many people of Hong Kong would take up the offer to come to the UK,

“We think that the majority of people would probably either hunker down in Hong Kong, and others would move to other countries in the region. But for us it's a point of principle, we want to live up to our commitments to the people of Hong Kong, and whilst China has failed to live up to its responsibilities in relation to the autonomy and the freedoms of the people of Hong Kong, we will stick by ours."