Leicester mayor accuses Matt Hancock of not sharing Covid-19 data

The mayor of Leicester has accused Matt Hancock and Public Health England (PHE) of withholding vital data that could help reduce the spread of coronavirus through BAME communities as well as workplaces.

In a letter to the health secretary on Thursday, Sir Peter Soulsby claimed that information sent from Whitehall to local officials did not disclose the ethnicity or workplaces of people who fall ill, increasing the difficulty of tracing the spread of the disease.

Local health officials have relied on figures about death rates and hospital admissions that provide limited information on the backgrounds of individuals, he said.

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“There have been misleading claims from the government about what data and information we are being provided. There is a good chance that other cities, some with high numbers of BAME people, will be put into lockdown and we need to get this right,” Soulsby wrote.

“If you look at Leicester, we have Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities, a sizeable Goan community, as well as communities from the Caribbean and Somalia.

“Only recently are we getting granular data [on coronavirus cases], and even then we are having to clear it up ourselves.”

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Bradford, Barnsley and Rochdale, other cities with large minority ethnic populations, have been identified by health officials as the places with the next biggest increases in coronavirus cases after Leiceser.

Soulsby sent the letter after the government claimed he and Leicester’s Labour-run council had failed to get a grip of the local outbreak.

Leicester was put into a city-wide lockdown last week after Hancock said the seven-day infection rate had reached 135 cases per 100,000 people, the highest in the country and three times higher than the next worst-hit city.

About half of Leicester’s population come from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. BAME people have accounted for 18.1% of all those testing positive for coronavirus in England so far, people from an Asian background almost 10%.

Soulsby, a former MP and councillor, apologised in June after being photographed at his partner’s home, in breach of the lockdown rules.

In his letter, he wrote that Leicester’s director of public health had repeatedly asked PHE to provide access to results data, preferably at a postcode or “lower super output” level, so that officials could monitor the spread of the disease street by street.

“This data was not forthcoming to us or other councils. The reason given for this was that it wasn’t in a fit state to publish because it hadn’t been ‘cleaned’. This was the data feed from the test-and-trace system that the PM had launched as ‘world-beating’,” he said.

Ethnicity data that was sent through was “incomplete”, according to Soulsby. “Currently only around half of the tests have completed ethnicity data. There is data for hospital cases but ethnicity is not a compulsory field.”

He also said the “occupation” heading in the data had little value. “Where several people in the same household are tested, the occupation of the person completing the form has been assigned to the whole household. Hence, for example, we have an eight-year-old being listed as a frontline healthcare worker,” Soulsby said.

Relations between the mayor and officials in central government have been tense over recent weeks. A Whitehall source said Soulsby had had many opportunities to get a grip on Leicester’s problems but had failed to do so or use the data available to him.

“He has been very difficult to deal with and has failed to engage with the problem or with data,” the source said.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “All councils in England now have the ability to access testing data, right down to an individual and postcode level. PHE has already been providing this data to directors of public health in the event of an outbreak so that they can take all necessary action to curb the spread.

“We continue to work closely with local authorities in Leicester and our focus is on further curbing the spread of the virus so these necessary restrictions can be removed as soon as possible.”