Andy Burnham says track and trace should work like jury service with full pay

People are not handing over the names of contacts in the Test and Trace programme for fear of putting friends and family in a "really difficult position", the Mayor of Greater Manchester has suggested.

Andy Burnham said people are worried about taking 14 days off work knowing they will not be paid, or be at risk of losing their job.

He said NHS Test and Trace will not work properly until this issue is addressed, adding that a solution may be to treat the contact tracing system as something "that's akin to jury duty" with people being able to self-isolate on full pay.

Mr Burnham said the system is "not good enough yet", telling BBC Radio 4's Today Programme: "So when I say not yet, it's because in Greater Manchester, when you look at the contacts of people who are testing positive, the wider group of friends and family, only 52% of people are being reached by the national Test and Trace system.

"And I think one of the reasons for that, there's a number of reasons, but one is a number of people in our poorer communities are finding it very, very hard to agree to a request to take 14 days off work when they know they won't be paid, or worse, they will lose their job.

"And this of course particularly affects people who are self-employed, or who are on zero hours contracts."

Mr Burnham said that the average rate of people handing over contact details was two and a half names.

He said: "And I think we need to do something here that's akin to jury service, you know, when you get a request to serve on a jury you're being asked to fulfil your public duty, and a request from NHS Test and Trace is similar because it's in the wider good of the local community that you take that time off work.

"So it shouldn't be that people are being kind of prevented from doing so by financial worries or worries about their job.

"What I'm saying to the Government is if people get those requests, they should immediately be able to self-isolate and this scheme should work on the jury service principle.

"They should be able to do it on full pay without any worries about those things."

Lockdown restrictions in Greater Manchester

Mr Burnham said local lockdown measures in Greater Manchester need to be maintained as eight out of 10 boroughs in the county recorded an increase in cases last week.

Mr Burnham was asked why there has to be an approach which treats the whole area of Greater Manchester in the same way.

He described the area as "interconnected", adding: "Nobody here, or very few anyway, live their life entirely within one borough.

"People are crossing borough boundaries multiple times in any given day.

"So while Wigan may have had a low number of cases on its own borough boundaries, its communities are on the doorstep of places with much higher levels.

"So that was the justification for why a Greater Manchester restriction was needed, because we saw a situation in Trafford which had similar case numbers to Wigan, but it shot up a couple of weeks ago and that's what can happen," he said.

The Government is expected to make an announcement on Friday on the status of the measures in the North West of England and Leicester.

Measures banning mixing between households were due for review on Thursday, a week after they were brought in for residents in Greater Manchester, parts of east Lancashire and West Yorkshire, as well as Leicester.