Tom Burridge
Transport correspondent

The Department for Transport said the £2bn announced for rail and roads by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps is not new funding.

The money is being reallocated from previous budgets.

Image source, PA Media

Charlotte Ivers from TalkRadio asks whether the government knows how many urgent operations were cancelled in March 2020.

Shapps says he doesn't know the answer, but will ask the health secretary.

"We are trying to get data out as much as possible," he says.

Tom Clarke from ITV asks about the new antibody test, when it will be rolled out and whom to.

Grant Shapps says the new test is "very exciting", describing it as a "very, very reliable antibody test".

Prof Jonathan Van-Tam says it "will be rapidly rolled out in the days and weeks to come - as soon as it is practical to do so".

He adds that tests will be first sent to hospital and care workers.

He also warns it will take "time" to understand whether having the antibodies protects against infection.

"You can't speed up the answer to that."

Click here to find out more about the antibody test.

Image source, Reuters

The BBC’s Alison Holt says there is growing anger in care sector and asks what the government can say to reassure people?

She also asks about the return of football's Premier League.

Shapps says care homes are specialists in infection control and they are routinely in the front line.

He says: "It is essential they are provided with every provision" and there is a big national effort to assist them.

On football, Prof Van Tam says easing social distancing has been “tentative” and “measured”, and this applies to all of elite sport.

First comes a return to safe training, while still observing social distancing, he says.

“We will have to see how that goes before we even think about the return of competitive football matches," he says. “We have to be slow, we have to be measured.”

Here’s more on the situation in care homes in the UK.

Image source, Getty Images

Grant Shapps says that with increasing capacity in the hospitals the government wants the NHS "to take up routine operations".

He says the health secretary will be saying more about that soon.

Prof Jonathan Van-Tam adds that "the NHS is not a Covid treatment service.

"Everybody in health is conscious that as soon as it is physically and humanely possible, services must be restored."

Some news from Italy, where 262 coronavirus-related deaths have been reported in the past 24 hours. It's the highest daily tally since 7 May.

This brings the country's overall death toll to 31,368 - the third-highest in the world behind only the US and the UK. However every country counts deaths differently and in Italy there is no national figure for those that occur in care homes. The UK's total now includes deaths across all settings.

Italy started easing lockdown restrictions on 4 May, with people now being allowed to visit their relatives in small numbers. Parks, factories and building sites are being reopened.

Helen from Chesham asks about her son who is a student – she says he will be "thousands of pounds worse off" and will miss out on the student experience if young people do not physically return to university.

Shapps says the education secretary will be providing further guidance on this.

He says we need to ensure social distancing remains in place.

It is a “wait and see” situation, he says, but “we are aware of the concerns”. He says they want to beat this virus in a way further education can get going again.

Image source, UK Government

Prof Jonathan Van-Tam now goes through today's slides. The first shows social distancing, using information collected by the Office of National Statistics.

He says the data shows that 80% of adults in Great Britain only left their homes for the permitted reasons, if at all.

"You can see there have been very dramatic and important changes that the British people have made that have contributed to where we are now in terms of being able to begin easing the social distancing restrictions," he says.

Our explainer here goes through the rules on social distancing.

Shapps says that there has been an "army" of infrastructure workers across the country.

There have been "accelerated" maintenance road and rail projects during lockdown.

Highways England has completed £200m worth of upgrades and Network Rail has done £550m of work in April alone, he says.

To make sure Britain is ready to "bounce back", they are announcing £2bn to upgrade roads and railways and to "get the economy growing again".

This will help fill millions of "dangerous pot holes", road and bridge repairs, he says.

It is unclear as to whether this is on top of the £2bn fund for walking and cycling improvements.

Reality Check

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps says 126,064 tests for coronavirus were managed on Wednesday – a 45% rise on the day before and the highest rate so far.

The target, set by the Health Secretary Matt Hancock last month, was for 100,000 tests per day in the UK, but the government has only intermittently reached this figure.

The target was reached on 30 April and then 1 May (although the figures include home tests sent out, but not yet returned or processed). But it was then missed for eight consecutive days.

The prime minister said the government hit the daily testing target again on Sunday, with 100,490 tests.

Boris Johnson also said the UK ‘’will go up to 200,000 by the end of the month”. There has been some confusion about this figure, which the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) says refers not to tests but to testing capacity, which is the number of tests that theoretically could be carried out per day.

Shapps reiterates it is “our civic duty” to avoid public transport.

In order to help reduce crowding, he says, the government has announced £2bn in funding to encourage cycling and walking.

Detailed guidance for local authorities has been published, he says, as well as for the transport sector and passengers.

He also urges the public to use a car when they can.

Here we look at how transport will need to change in England, after employees were encouraged to go back to work this week.

Image source, AFP

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps begins by saying he will set out "how this downtime has been used to fix and upgrade the nation’s road and rail structure".

He then goes through the new Covid-19 alert system, as announced by the PM on Sunday.

Here’s all you need to know about the new lockdown measures in England.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has arrived and the UK government's press briefing is now under way.

He is joined by England's Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam.

Garden centres and recycling centres in Northern Ireland can reopen from next Monday as part of the first steps to ease lockdown, First Minister Arlene Foster has said.

On Tuesday, the executive published a five-phase blueprint for lifting restrictions but it did not include a timeframe.

The first minister said updated medical advice meant the executive could now approve the "tentative first steps".

• Read more on this story here.

We should be hearing from the UK government in the next few minutes.

But that gives you time to watch this short film from Radio 4’s Money Box, who spoke to people who have been using the lockdown to launch new business ventures.

This could be one topic asked about in the government briefing that's about to begin.

An antibody test, which is expected to be rolled out across the UK, could lead to "some kind of health certificate", UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's official spokesperson said earlier today.

The test, which can determine whether people have been infected and now might now have some immunity, has been approved in the EU and US - and now by health officials in England.

The spokesperson said: "We have talked about, in the future, the potential for some kind of health certificate related to whether or not you have antibodies."

But they stressed more information was needed on immunity and coronavirus "to better understand the potential of the test".

The World Health Organization has warned governments not to issue so-called "immunity passports" or "risk-free certificates" as a way of easing lockdowns.

Image source, MOD/PA Media

We will be hearing from the UK government shortly. You can watch the government's daily coronavirus briefing on the BBC News channel by pressing the play button on the video at the top of this page.

But while we wait, you have time to read this explainer from our health reporter Rachel Schraer, who looks at how the government’s testing strategy is developing.

Image source, Reuters

US President Donald Trump has again condemned China's handling of the coronavirus outbreak, threatening to end relations with Beijing.

"There are many things we could do. We could cut off the whole relationship," Trump said in Thursday's interview with Fox Business, external.

"Now, if you did, what would happen?" asked Trump rhetorically. "You’d save $500bn (£409bn) if you cut off the whole relationship."

It was an apparent reference to a huge US deficit in bilateral trade with China.

Washington has for some time been considering pressing China for virus-related compensation, accusing it of initially withholding information about the outbreak.

China has repeatedly denied the accusations.

Trump's anti-China rhetoric is seen by many as part of his re-election strategy for November's presidential vote.

We should be hearing from the UK government shortly (at 17:00 BST), but let’s take a look at the latest headlines first.

• Transport for London says it needs money from the government by the end of the day to avoid a reduction in services
• A test to find out whether people have been infected with coronavirus in the past has been approved by health officials in England
• A&E visits in England have halved since the coronavirus outbreak started, dropping to their lowest level since records began
• Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says her ministers are "not ruling out" easing lockdown in some areas ahead of others
• One in 400 people in England has coronavirus, a survey of nearly 11,000 people suggests
• The National Care Association has said care homes felt "completely abandoned" as the coronavirus crisis swept across the UK

With apprenticeships and junior positions being cut, and with little savings to fall back on, many young adults in the UK are under considerable financial strain due to lockdown restrictions.

While some can work from home, others will rely on the UK government's furlough programme, and some are out of a job completely.

The BBC's Ben Hunte spoke to one group of friends who live together in Manchester but are all facing very different work situations.