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The Euro 2020 fan zone in Glasgow will be one of the safest places to watch the tournament, an official claims.

Up to 6,000 people a day - split into two sessions - will watch matches at Glasgow Green's fan zone on every day of the tournament, which starts tomorrow.

Some safety concerns had been raised because people are not required to take a lateral flow test before attending - but Scottish Health Secretary Humza Yousaf says it is a "low-risk event".

Chris Weitz, one of the zone's organisers, said it will be safe because fans will be outside, at separate tables, and with two metres social distancing.

It's the first time Scotland's men's team has qualified in more than 20 years.

Read more here on how to watch Euro 2020 this summer.

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The funeral of senior republican Bobby Storey - a former head of intelligence of the IRA - brought 2,000 mourners onto the streets of west Belfast in June 2020 at a time when Covid-19 restrictions were in place.

Now a review by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) in Northern Ireland has backed an earlier decision not to prosecute anyone for attending.

It re-examined the case against 24 Sinn Féin politicians - including Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neil - who were investigated for a suspected breach of health regulations.

The PPS decided that unclear regulations and prior engagement between police and organisers of the funeral posed "an insurmountable difficulty" to bringing any successful prosecutions.

The review agreed that the case failed the evidence test.

Read more here.

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Elsewhere at the House of Commons, the chief civil servant of the Department of Health, Sir Chris Wormald, has been appearing before the Commons Public Accounts Committee.

As part of its inquiry - "Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic", the permanent secretary outlined the costs of the protective equipment.

He told MPs the cost of storing PPE supplies is running at £6.7m a week.

Sir Chris said: "We have bought approximately £32bn items of PPE during the pandemic at a cost of approximately £15bn. Of those, 11.7 billion items have been distributed to the frontline so far, 12.6 billion are held in the UK as central stock, and 8.4 billion is not yet in the UK, it's on order from other parts of the world."

Referring to the 12.6 billion currently being stored in the UK, he said on today's numbers "it's costing us approximately £6.7m a week to store".

He said storage costs had fallen since January this year, but it remained a "large cost".

The World at One
BBC Radio 4

The head of one of the UK's largest care home operators has said Matt Hancock's evidence on care homes was "utter nonsense".

The health secretary quoted a Public Health England report saying 1.6% of lab-confirmed outbreaks in care homes came from hospital to care home transmission.

But Pete Calveley, Chairman of Barchester Care Homes, told Radio 4's World at One: "I honestly think that's utter nonsense.

"If there was no testing, how can they tell that it didn't come from care homes? All of our care homes were admitting people from hospital without testing.

"Outbreaks often followed subsequently. None of the public or visitors were coming into our homes. So the main issue is, either it came from the hospital with asymptomatic patients being discharged or it came from our staff.

"And as the hospitals were absolutely rife with Covid, and people didn't understand asymptomatic aerosol spread, to say that only 2% of cases were caused by hospital discharge just seems illogical and complete nonsense."

It's an issue that Hancock has been speaking about previously in recent days.

Want to read more? Here's an explainer on what happened to care homes early in the pandemic.

The health secretary has been answering questions from MPs on his handling of the pandemic for the last four hours. Here are five things we've picked out.

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Health Secretary Matt Hancock has just finished giving evidence about Covid to MPs on the health and science committees.

Here are some of the key things we learned from the session, which lasted more than four hours:

• Of new Covid cases, 91% are now the Delta variant which first emerged in India, Hancock says
• There needs to be a fully independent investigation about the origins of the virus, Hancock says, because "we do need to get to the bottom of this"
• He says he "bitterly regrets" not pushing back against initial scientific advice which said Covid was unlikely to spread asymptomatically - something later found not to be true
• Hancock says he was aware that up to 820,000 people could die - which was described as the "worst-case scenario" in January 2020 - but that ordering an earlier lockdown would have gone against the scientific advice
• He says it was not obvious at the start of the pandemic that people would accept lockdowns - or "how long they would put up with it" - even though that is clear now
• The health secretary says when he told Cabinet members he would have to tell people to stop social contact, it was "the most extraordinary thing that I've ever said"
• Hancock defends the government's initial advice to care homes that Covid testing was not necessary before they received patients from hospitals
• He stresses that ministers always "followed the clinical advice"
• The minister says he made the decision to increase the amount of AstraZeneca vaccine bought by the government - the initial advice was 30m doses and he said he decided 100m were needed

• He says he saw no evidence to suggest any medics died due to a failure to provide them with PPE during the pandemic - he adds there was never a national shortage of equipment
• Hancock also faced a series of questions about Dominic Cummings' evidence to MPs, in which he accused the health secretary of lying to the prime minister - he denies this, and says he has "no idea" why the former PM's aide appears to have so much animosity towards him
• He says the government has "operated much better in the past six months" since Cummings left Downing Street

Read our full story here.

Greg Clark asks what the plan is if there is a "vaccine escape" from coronavirus, through a new variant.

"mRNA technologies can develop a new vaccine" for a new variant "in a matter of days," replies Hancock.

In the meantime, the tools that would be used are the ones "that we have available".

"Is there a plan for this, is it written down?" asks Clark.

"We don't have a published plan, but we have the playbook in front of us," replies Hancock.

Greg Clark asks if it would be a good idea to publish such a plan ahead of time.

Hancock says he would "consider" this, but "vaccine escape is a relative, not an absolute".

"Writing a plan for an absolute vaccine escape, is essentially writing up a plan for a new pandemic," Hancock says.

"We are better prepared by a long shot for a new pandemic," he adds.

And that brings an end to Hancock's appearance in front of the committee.

Asked by Jeremy Hunt whether people are likely to have died because they picked up Covid in hospital, Matt Hancock says "there's no doubt" - but "the precise numbers are hard to ascertain".

Hunt points out that regular testing for NHS staff wasn't rolled out across the system until November, and Hancock puts this down to testing capacity again.

"The lesson for the future for me is to make sure you have that testing capacity as a standing capacity ready to go," he says.

He agrees with Hunt that some hospital ventilations weren't good enough.

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Labour MP Taiwo Owatemi asks if Hancock accepts that large staffing shortages have made it more difficult for hospitals to cope during the pandemic.

"I'm just delighted that we were recruiting at pace as we went into the pandemic," he says, adding that the NHS employed those who were just about to graduate, as well as those who had recently retired.

Owatemi asks how such "dangerous staffing shortages can be avoided" in the future.

Hancock says it is a commitment from his party to employ 50,000 more nurses.

Owatemi asks if the comparably small number of ICU beds we have compared to other countries caused us problems in the beginning.

"One of the lessons is that we needed more ICU beds," replies Hancock.

Owatemi asks if critical NHS infrastructure was under sufficient pressure that lives were at risk.

Hancock says there were hospitals "which got to the limit of the number of patients they can supply with oxygen," but he says "one of the main advantages" of the NHS is that patient load can be shared with other hospitals.

Ms Owatemi asks if restrictions are still on track to be removed on 21 June.

"You tempt me, but unfortunately I'm not going to be able to say anything" before the prime minister speaks next Monday, Hancock replies, adding that the government is looking at the data "every day".

Conservative Paul Bristow asks where the balance in decision making lay for lockdowns.

"That balance is something that only the prime minister can bring together," replies Matt Hancock.

Bristow asks what is the most recent assessment of the spread of the Delta variant - first identified in India - in the UK.

"The Delta variant now comprises 91% of new cases in the UK," replies Hancock, according to data he saw last night.

Carol Monaghan says Dominic Cummings claimed the prime minister rejected advice from Sage, the government's scientific advisers, to introduce a "circuit breaker" lockdown last September

"I certainly discussed it with him, I can't recall whether it was specifically discussed at Cabinet," he says, adding there was "ongoing debate" about what to do with rising case numbers.

"I spoke directly to the prime minister throughout this period and he took advice from a huge range of people."

Monaghan asks whether the prime minister said "we shouldn't have done the first lockdown", to which Hancock responds: "I have certainly never heard the prime minister say anything like that."

Conservative Aaron Bell asks if it was Matt Hancock who decided to buy 100m doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

"I decided that we needed 100m, and got agreement with that across Whitehall," Hancock replies. He says the original advice was that only 30m were required.

Aaron Bell asks if the UK should have adopted "human challenge trials" given the scale of the problem. Human challenge trials are when scientists deliberately infect a person with the virus after they have been vaccinated, to see how the body responds.

"My view was, I pushed for the system to go as fast as possible, but I was not prepared to go faster than the science would credibly allow," Hancock replies.

"You have to make sure you have clinical confidence in safety and efficacy," Hancock adds, "you have to follow the science".

Has the WHO "got it wrong on the origin of the coronavirus?" asks Mr Bell.

"I don't know, and nobody knows," replies Hancock. "I think it is vital that we have a fully independent investigation in China".

"At the moment, it is impossible to know," he adds, "we do need to get to the bottom of this".

Dean Russell, Conservative MP for Watford, continues the questioning about the use of data.

He wants to know if the government will continue to provide the sort of information that it makes public - like that given on the coronavirus dashboard - after the pandemic.

Hancock says the health department will be launching a data strategy for the department that will set this out in detail in the next few weeks - he says he hopes data will be at the heart of the NHS moving forward.

"We've made big strides but there's a lot further to go," he says.

He gives the example of a recovery trial run out of Oxford University that uncovered the fact that dexamethasone "could save lives".

"Over a million people are alive today because of that data," he adds.

He says he believes every citizen should allow their data to be used "anonymously and safely" for research if they wish.

"We must maintain people's trust and consent in the process," he adds.

Labour's Dawn Butler asks if Matt Hancock was ever involved in procurement contracts.

"No," Hancock replies.

"Whenever people came forward" he would pass them on to officials, he states.

Butler says in an email sent in during the height of the pandemic, Samir Jassal approached Hancock with offers for PPE.

Jassal's company went from a value of £200 to £100m in value during the pandemic, all because he started making PPE for the NHS, Dawn Butler says.

"We were buying PPE as a government in order to protect lives," Hancock says.

"I knew that if we didn't buy enough, we wouldn't have enough PPE," he says, adding: "There was a global scramble for PPE."

The government spent £600,000 defending unlawful conduct of how a contract was handed out this week, Butler says. She asks if this was a responsible use of public money.

The government was doing things "at pace" and under "very difficult circumstances", Hancock replies. He adds that this court case was a different department to his.

Asked by Sarah Owen why companies that had "zero experience" in PPE were called on to produce it, Hancock says ministers looked to procure it "from anybody who could offer it" and that "the decisions on individual contracts were made by officials, quite rightly".

Back on care homes, Owen also asks Hancock why he said there was a four-day turnaround for tests at the start of the pandemic, even though in March 2020 the NHS website said most came through in 24 hours.

"Not all of them came through within 24 hours," he says. "But... whatever the time period the point is the same. You can catch Covid in a hospital after taking a test before getting the result."

He adds: "That is only one part of the reason that the decisions were taken and those decisions were all taken on clinical advice."

Sarah Owen says Dominic Cummings described a clash of egos behind the scenes at No 10, but Hancock says his relationship with the Cabinet Office and the Treasury was "great".

He says he has an "exemplary" relationship with Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove and that the Treasury put "unprecedented" amounts of money into combatting the pandemic.

"When I had problems I've raised it with ministers and they were normally resolved," he says, adding that there was usually a good reason if they weren't.

Owen says that's a very different picture to the one painted, and points out that Gove was "barely mentioned" in Cummings' testimony, but the health secretary got a "fairly rough ride".

"I'm not responsible for anybody else's testimony, but I am really pleased to have the chance to come here to be able to tell you the truth," Hancock says.

Sarah Owen, Labour MP for Luton North, takes the health secretary back to his statement earlier "when you said there was never a shortage of PPE".

She asks: "How can you say that when we saw with our own eyes nurses in bin bags?"

He responds that there was "never a point at a national level where we ran out".

Hancock goes on to praise NHS workers, saying: "I have enormous admiration and pride for those in NHS teams who put themselves in danger on the wards - and I know many sadly lost their lives."

He says "no PPE is perfect".

Owen asks who was responsible for prioritising PPE, adding that Cummings "made it sound like chaos".

The health secretary says it was a huge pressure and challenge but said the "team rose to that challenge to ensure we did the best we possibly could".

"I know it wasn't perfect but what you need to do in a pandemic is work as it as hard as we could."

Owens presses him on the chain of command for ordering PPE and he responds: "It's my responsibility as secretary of state."

He goes on: "There is no evidence shortage of PPE led to anyone dying of Covid - that is from the evidence I have seen.

"I do know provision was tight but we did manage to ensure we had it a national level."

"That's a bold claim," says Owen, and asks him to share the evidence.

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Matt Hancock is lying to MPs when he claims there was no shortage of personal protective equipment shortage during the pandemic, the GMB union says.

The health secretary said earlier there was never a shortage of PPE because of the actions the government took, removing a cap on the price that could be paid for it.

But the GMB says its members across the NHS reported shortages of PPE on numerous occasions and says it contacted the Department of Health and Social Care on several occasions to raise this.

It says members were at one stage issued with emergency guidance advising reuse of disposable PPE.

Rachel Harrison, GMB national officer, says: “Matt Hancock either has no idea what happened under his watch during the pandemic, or he is lying through his teeth."

She says lack of PPE was "probably the number one complaint" of the union's members during the crisis.

“Many were left terrified for their lives treating Covid-positive patients with either inadequate or non-existent PPE," she adds.

A report from the National Audit Office published in November, external said “government structures were overwhelmed in March 2020” and “it took a long time for it to receive the large volumes of PPE ordered”.

Hancock says he knew there was "something happening in Kent" in November 2020, but we "didn't know exactly what the problem was".

But, if the UK locks down it has "an immediate and certain cost" and that is a "very difficult judgement to strike".

"You have to act early and you have to act firmly," he states.

Hancock adds that "sadly" the UK will probably face another pathogen "like this in less than 100 years".

Dr Luke Evans asks if the UK can "lead at the forefront" of genomic testing for pathogens to identify mutations and variations.

"I think that the G7 is an incredibly important moment for our likeminded allies to come together on this view," Hancock replies, "it is also critical that this is global... World Health Organization reform is vital" so that there can be "transparency".

Conservative MP Dr Luke Evans asks how Matt Hancock planned to do the first national lockdown.

"Epidemiology is the science of risk, and it is all about the balance of different risks," replies Hancock.

"I'm trained as an economist... it allows you similar training in the understanding of these constructs," he adds.

Dr Evans asks how decisions were made "at the top".

Hancock says there was an "exponential demand for testing" while the pandemic continued "as a straight line" climbing.

"When it came to the second lockdown," he states, "when case numbers are low but rising, you can see what is likely to happen."

He says bringing in any lockdown has "definite and immediate costs".