Today we heard from three mayors about their experiences working with central government. Here are the key points:

London - Sadiq Khan

• Khan said his first briefing from his staff about Covid came from sources such as newspapers and the web - not from government

• The London mayor claimed he was "blocked" from attending Cobra meetings until 16 March

• He believes lives could have been saved if he had been invited to meetings sooner as he could have lobbied for an earlier lockdown

Greater Manchester - Andy Burnham

• Burnham said he was refused invitations to Cobra meetings and became aware of Covid through the Chinese community in Manchester
• The mayor claimed he had to raise issues in the media "because we had no alternative"
• He recalled that he received no notification from Nicola Sturgeon about the travel ban between Manchester and Scotland
• Burnham said he received "minimal" notice about local restrictions on household mixing in the Greater Manchester area on 30 July
• He called for more devolution in future emergencies

Liverpool City Region - Steve Rotheram

• Rotheram said he was not informed people from Wuhan would be isolating in the area and found out about Covid "on the news"
• He said there was no official channel to raise issues, and that officials would wait for the evening news to hear major announcements
• He says his social media team dealt with threats after the PM announced - without informing him - that the region would enter tier 3

Pete Weatherby KC now questions Rotheram on behalf of the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice group.

He asks the Liverpool mayor a question around the Atletico Madrid-Liverpool match, which was held on the same day the WHO director declared Covid to be a pandemic and called for urgent action internationally to combat its spread.

The match was attended by more than 50,000 people, Weatherby says, including about 3,000 people from Madrid - although Spain already had high case numbers.

Rotheram is asked: "In terms of the match going ahead, were you consulted by ministers or government officials about the decision?

"At no stage were we consulted by anybody," Rotheram says.

"Quite the opposite: we were trying to get information but at that stage the government said the fixture was low-risk."

Asked whether he thought at the time that the match should have gone ahead, Rotheram says: "We had no scientific evidence to support that we were concerned about it, but had the goverment said it should not go ahead, I think everyone would have breathed a sigh of relief."

Today's session of the Covid Inquiry has now ended. It will resume tomorrow, when it will focus on decision making and political governance during the pandemic.

Rotheram is asked about the Champions League football match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid on 11 March 2020 and why he considered herd immunity to be a real possibility at that stage.

He says: "Because the government didn't seem to have any strategy to tackling the pandemic and it appeared that they were just allowing things to happen.

"I'm not a scientist - I hadn't heard of herd immunity beforehand - this was something we were reading about and learning about and worried about.

"But we do know from evidence to this inquiry that there were allegations against the PM about piling up the bodies and that's how it felt out on the front line of this, it felt as if they were just going to allow it to let rip - and that was a major concern for us."

Rotheram is being asked about the announcement that the Liverpool City region would be entering tier 3 on 12 October. The mayor says that this happened without any notification to him.

As soon as the PM announced this, "Twitter blew up," he says.

Rotherham's social media team dealt with "all sorts of threats and unintended consequences" - including direct threats to the mayor himself which resulted in the chief constable having to post 24-hour security.

"I'm not sure when the PM broke the agreement with me that in any way he thought that might have been a consequence - that's why I was so clear about what we needed to do."

Rotheram says that there was no official channel to raise particular issues, and that officials would wait for the evening news to see whether a major announcement would be made.

Asked whether that presented challenges, Rotheram answers: "Consistently."

"We were reacting rather than proactively working with government," he adds.

"On messaging we desperately needed a single voice and some coherence around that message - and that was often lost because things would be quite fluid and change and things would flip-flop," Rotheram adds.

Rotheram says he was not informed people from Wuhan would be isolating in the area.

"People who came from Wuhan to isolate and go to Arrowe Park Hospital came through many areas and ended up in the Liverpool City region and we weren't even informed that these people were going to travel through our area or end up in a hospital environment being isolated", he says.

He says he found out about it "on the news" with no communication in advance, adding: "That seems to be the way things were conducted early on."

Before we bring you evidence from Rotheram, at the end of Andy Burnham's evidence he was asked about lessons he'd learned from the pandemic.

Burnham stressed his frustration at the government's inability to understand what people in the north of England were experiencing.

He said that on the final day when Greater Manchester was about to have tier three imposed on 20 October 2020, he had a final call with PM.

According to the mayor, when he said that the authority could not agree to the government's package of support because it was "not enough" as "we've been under restrictions for a long time" the PM's response was "what do you mean?"

He explained that the region had been "under restrictions since July", Burnham recalled.

"To me it didn't seem that he did know about that. He wasn't aware that we'd been struggling all of that time.

"A more devolved approach to the pandemic would have been a safer approach."

Finally today, the inquiry will take evidence from the Mayor of the Liverpool City Region Steve Rotheram.

He was elected as the area's first metro mayor in 2017.

Along with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Rotheram had previously criticised the government’s initial response on financial support during the 2020 autumn regional lockdown.

Rotheram is up now, so stick with us for all the key lines.

Matt Hancock to give evidence later this weekpublished at 15:31 Greenwich Mean Time 27 November 2023

15:31 GMT 27 November 2023

Aurelia Foster
Health reporter

Image source, PA Media

The biggest name to give evidence to the inquiry this week will be Matt Hancock MP, who was health secretary at the start of the pandemic.

On Thursday and Friday, he’ll be asked about how he made key political decisions on issues such as the UK-wide lockdown and social distancing rules.

Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, will want to know about the atmosphere inside 10 Downing Street in the early days of the pandemic - and what may have influenced those big decisions.

Hancock will likely feel he has to defend some of the criticism levelled at him by others appearing at the inquiry.

Sir Patrick Vallance, former chief scientific adviser to the government last week said Hancock had a habit of saying things he "didn't really have a basis for, too enthusiastically and too early... without having any evidence, and then had to backtrack.”

He added that he thought Hancock didn’t always tell the truth.

Sir Simon Stevens, former NHS England chief told the inquiry Hancock wanted to decide “who should live and die”.

The inquiry previously heard how the then cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill wanted Hancock sacked.

Hancock is also likely to be grilled about the testing programme, after he was accused of rejecting expert advice on this issue earlier this year – something he has denied.

Andy Burnham has now finished giving evidence and the inquiry is pausing for a short break.

Burnham says former health secretary Matt Hancock “knew tier three restrictions would not work” during the pandemic.

Quoting from written evidence submitted by Hancock, Burnham said: “He says in his evidence about tier three, ‘I was in despair that we had announced a policy that we knew would not work’.”

Burnham goes on to say: “It makes me angry on behalf of the people of Greater Manchester that they say in that room and they imposed a policy that they had been advised by Sage (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) and others would not work.”

Laura Gozzi
Live reporter

Looking back at the system that regulated the lives of England residents in late 2020 and early 2021 brings back memories of how complex, fast-changing and often confusing the rules were.

The autumn of 2020 saw Covid infections rising across the UK - leading to so-called "three-tier system" coming into force in England from 14 October 2020.

The system saw every area of England be classed as being on medium, high or very high alert, and it remained in place until 5 November, when a month-long national lockdown was brought in.

But the system didn't stem infections. The end of the lockdown in early December brought on a spike of Covid cases. A new, more rigorous tier system was brought in, which then PM Boris Johnson justified by saying: "We can't afford to take our foot off the throat of the beast... to let it out of control again."

But the new tiers failed to contain infections, which were ramped up by a new Covid variant.

On 19 December, the PM announced the government was bringing new tier-four restrictions - dubbed the "Stay at Home" level - which restricted people to meeting only one other person from outside their household, and only in an open public space.

Initially, only London, Kent and Essex and other parts of the South East were subject to tier four regulations. By January 2021, eight in 10 people in England were in tier four.

The tier system in England lasted until 29 March, when it was replaced by a new set of regulations - the so-called "roadmap out of lockdown".

Burnham is talking about his concerns about the tier system and says he wanted a national circuit breaker "rather than the north standing alone".

He says he and the other Metro mayors did "very much so" feel they were standing alone.

"It just felt we were treated in a way that other parts of country wouldn't be treated.

"There is no way a borough in greater London - or the wider South East - would be treated like Bolton was."

Burnham is now talking about a meeting between Metro mayors and Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, on 5 October 2020 - which is "stuck in his mind" as his 20th wedding anniversary was two days later.

He says a few days later, he saw the front page of a newspaper saying pubs were to close across northern England - the first of the tier three issues, and a decision which hadn't been mentioned to him in the meeting with Hancock, he says.

Burnham has just been asked how much notice he received of a government decision to introduce local restrictions on household mixing in the Greater Manchester area on 30 July at midnight.

He says he received "minimal" notice.

He describes receiving a call from the heath secretary at around 16:00 on the day of the announcement.

"I was chaotic, it was as chaotic as it gets.

"He gave me an hour to talk to local leaders."

Burnham says he remembers the health secretary made "a very cursory announcement" at 20:00 that night, confirming that Manchester would be placed under restrictions.

"And then all hell broke loose".

Burnham says he was then inundated with messages on Twitter from childminders, painter and decorators, care workers - all wondering whether they could go to work the following day.

Burnham is asked about a "dispute" he had in the first half of 2021 with the then first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon.

It came after she announced that people could no longer travel between Manchester, Salford or Bolton, and Scotland.

He says there was "no notification, no consultation" on the issue and that the first he heard of it was while doing a BBC Manchester radio show.

He says this is "exactly what the SNP would always accuse Westminster of doing to Scotland".

"They had done exactly the same to us." It was "another example of a lack of UK coordination," he adds.

Burnham says he asked for patient identifiable test and trace data in June 2020 but "it was refused for weeks and weeks and weeks".

"I had to enter another media battle to try and get hold of that data."

Asked why the data was important, he replied: "Lockdown had been lifted too early, we had a high case rate, many of our residents were in jobs where they couldn't get sick pay, they couldn't go home if they got ill because their employment wouldn't support them getting paid if they were off ill."

The Greater Manchester mayor says the difference between the test and trace system and what the region wanted to do locally was that the national system was "making calls from call centres that nobody was answering".

"We wanted data so we could knock on doors," he says, adding that they got the data "after a battle".

Anger over Manchester testingpublished at 14:40 Greenwich Mean Time 27 November 2023

14:40 GMT 27 November 2023

Jim Reed
Health reporter

Andy Burnham reacted angrily just then when asked about community testing for Covid in Greater Manchester.

On 18 March 2020, he said there was a "significant moment" when he was informed that testing in the region, then run by local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) was being stood down.

GGCs were local NHS bodies responsible for the planning and commissioning of health care services for their area.

Instead Burnham said he was told testing was going to be centralised and run at a site near Manchester airport.

"That location was chosen without any consultation with us," he added.

He said using the airport "might have made sense" to someone sitting in Downing Street but residents couldn't easily access it if they lived in places like Oldham or Rochdale.

"I mean, fancy opening a testing station in Greater Manchester without asking us about the location," he said.

Burnham is asked whether WhatsApps and texts were an appropriate way of running communications during the pandemic.

"[They] could be... but it wasn't adequate because we needed a place where a mayor raised something and everyone heard it," Burnham says. "It was better than nothing but it was not sufficient."

Burnham says the scenario was "massively centralised," resulting in a system like Greater Manchester being "simply bypassed". He recalls "genuine astonishment" when word came through from officials that local testing would be "stood down".

"I could not begin to get my head around why local testing would be stood down," Burnham said. In his statement, he described being informed of this decision on 18 March as a "key moment".

Keating asks Burnham whether he was invited to attend any Cobra meetings in the lead up to the first lockdown. "No," he says.

Asked whether he himself requested to attend any of these meetings, Burnham replies "repeatedly".

Attending Cobra meetings would have been beneficial, Burnham says, as it could have been a "structured environment where serious issues could have been properly raised".

For example, he says, both he and the mayor of the Liverpool City region repeatedly raised the issue of financial support for people on the lowest incomes, those doing insecure work, the self-employed and freelancers.

"We raised them in the media because we had no alternative," he explains.

The mayor adds: "If Cobra had been properly structured we would have been able to put these issues on the agenda, have proper responses to them - but we were never afforded that opportunity."