West Yorkshire will move into coronavirus Tier 3 on Monday

West Yorkshire will be moving into a Tier 3 local lockdown, Leeds City Council leader Judith Blake has told a press conference amid a surge in coronavirus cases.

Leeds, Wakefield, Kirklees, Calderdale, Bradford will all move into the most severe of the government’s classifications for regional restrictions on from 12.01am on Monday.

The lockdown will see hospitality businesses forced to close and an outright ban on household mixing in all settings, following in the footsteps of the likes of Liverpool and Leeds.

The city council's chief executive Tom Riordan said a support package of £46.6 million had been negotiated with the Government for the region in addition to the Tier 2 funding already agreed.

He said there would also be an additional £12.7 million for testing and tracing.

Meanwhile Julian Hartley, chief executive of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, told the virtual press conference the city's hospitals were currently caring for 268 Covid patients - a figure higher than in the first wave of the pandemic - and he expected this to keep rising for some days.

The city's director of public health, Victoria Eaton, said the latest case rate for Leeds is 416.7 per 100,000 people - adding that a "cause of concern" was that, for the first time on Wednesday, the age group with the highest number of cases was the 30 to 44-year-olds rather than the 16 to 29-year-olds.

She said the situation is "incredibly challenging at the moment".