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9.46am GMT
Britain’s foremost economics thinktank has urged Rishi Sunak to use next month’s budget to announce a targeted extension of government support to tackle a “triple challenge” to the economy from Brexit, Covid and global heating.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the chancellor needed to steer clear of raising taxes in response to record peacetime borrowing of about £400bn inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic and called on him instead to focus on supporting the UK’s economic recovery from lockdown.
Related: IFS urges Rishi Sunak not to raise taxes and to extend support for economy
9.41am GMT
Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi suggested accessibility issues and hesitancy over safety is behind lower uptake of coronavirus vaccines among social care workers.
He told LBC:
It’s partly driven by accessibility. If I take the residential care homes for the elderly and the social care workers and the care workers that work with them and of course the domiciliary care as well, part of it is accessibility so we’re going back four times into residential homes to deliver the two doses.
That accessibility to staff is beginning to pay off. Allowing them to book on the national booking system, I had a look at this on Saturday and out of 264,000 bookings on the national booking system 91,000 were from social care.
The vaccination is not mandatory. Employers have been talking to us, they are concerned about their duty of care for the residents, the elderly residents, especially if the virus mutates.
At the moment, the dominant virus in the UK, the vaccines work well against the dominant virus.
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This content first appear on the guardian