Plans to sign off the government’s strategy to end all remaining Covid regulations in England have been delayed at the last minute amid tensions between the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and the health secretary, Sajid Javid, over funds for free Covid testing.
Cabinet ministers were told of the delay as they arrived at No 10 on Monday morning amid the final wrangling over the “living with Covid” strategy expected to be announced to the House of Commons in the afternoon.
A government source said there was still no agreement between the Treasury and the Department of Health and Social Care on the extent of the testing cutbacks, although another source at the DHSC insisted Javid had accepted the fiscal position that most testing must end.
The source denied Javid was seeking new money and said that instead he wanted to “reprioritise” his existing budgets by moving funds from other areas within the department to cover the additional testing.
“DHSC are absolutely not asking for additional funding, they want to reprioritise within the existing budget,” the source said.
Last week, the Guardian reported that the Treasury was driving efforts to reduce costs from an estimated annual £15bn, with an opening suggestion of cutting the budget by more than 90%, to £1.3bn.
Javid is said to want to fund enough testing to ensure the survival of the Panoramic antiviral drugs trial, which officials believe would need free lateral flow tests for over-50s and vulnerable adults under 50 until at least September.
Scientists, medics and public health experts have already expressed concerns about the plan to scrap most PCR testing and restrict free lateral flows, probably to older age groups. The national contact tracing service is expected to be wound down and schoolchildren will no longer be told to get tested twice a week.
There are concerns that a lack of community testing could hamper the Panoramic trial into the effectiveness of antivirals, although government sources said officials were looking at options for recruiting volunteers in other ways.
Johnson is likely to unveil the plan later on Monday in a Commons statement before giving a press conference, announcing an end to mandatory isolation in England and huge reductions in mass testing.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said: “The government is paralysed by its own chaos and incompetence and the British public are paying the price. This shambles cannot continue.
“What confidence can the public have that the Conservatives are acting in the national interest, when they can’t agree a plan for Covid? It is clear the prime minister was trying to declare victory before the war is over, simply to distract from the police knocking at the door of No 10.
“Labour published our plan for living well with Covid in January. It would prepare us for new variants and secure our lives, livelihoods and liberties. If the Conservatives are too incompetent to agree their own plan, they are welcome to use ours.”
The delay came as one Tory MP expressed apprehension about the government’s plan to cut back on Covid testing in the community.
Tim Loughton, a former minister, said he was pleased the government was trying to get back to as much “normality as possible”. But he told the BBC’s Westminster Hour: “I have slight apprehensions in that I think we still do need to have testing available widely because I think that is the reassurance people can have that they’ve taken all possible precautions and they don’t want to infect other people.”
Paul Scully, a business minister, said it was the right thing to do as the government could not “wrap people up in cotton wool for the rest of our lives”.
Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, he said: “Infections are coming down quite rapidly, the hospitalisations and deaths are following as well – they tend to lag behind, obviously, the case numbers – but nonetheless you can see the trend within that.”
He said Johnson would be “looking at the best advice possible but getting the balance right”.
Scully also said companies would have to pay for testing and decide policies on self-isolation for staff.
“We don’t test for flu, we don’t test for other diseases, and if the variants continue to be as mild as Omicron then there’s a question mark as to whether people will go through that regular testing anyway,” he told Times Radio.
“But if employers want to be paying (for) tests and continuing a testing regime within their workplace, then that will be for them to pay at that point,” he said, adding that while the impact on the virus on clinically vulnerable people was a concern, “we’re not going to be having a testing regime for the next 50 years”.