Mayor Marvin Rees 'not confident' Bristol will move to tier 2

The mayor of Bristol says he is "not confident" the city will be downgraded to tier two next week, despite a "dramatic" fall in coronavirus cases.

Marvin Rees said he hoped to "qualify for tier two" but said the city was not in control of the decision.

The government will announce next week the latest tiers for England, which will come into force on 19 December,

Bristol has been in tier three since the end of national lockdown on 2 December.

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Mr Rees said in his fortnightly press conference: "I am not confident we are going to go into tier two because we are not in control of that decision, and there will be other factors over which we have no control."

He said the "lag time on pressure on hospital beds" was a regional issue.

"Hospital bed pressure is not just Bristol, we are part of BNSSG (Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire) in terms of health, so I am not confident."

Mr Rees said he had written to the government about the issue and "had a letter back from the minister letting us know it is not our decision, it is a government decision".

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said decisions over tiers were based on a range of criteria, including how quickly case rates are going up or down, cases in the over-60s, pressure on the NHS and local circumstances.

"The government will review the tiering allocations every 14 days and areas will move up or down the tiers based on these indicators from local areas," they added.

Mr Rees said moving to tier two would benefit the local economy and jobs, "particularly around the night-time and hospitality sector" of pubs and restaurants.

The mayor said there had been 15,783 coronavirus cases in Bristol since the start of the pandemic.

"Having been in single digits for the summer per 100,000 population, we had a rapid increase through the autumn but that has been coming down quite dramatically."

Mr Rees said the city now had 141 cases per 100,000 which "puts us below the England average - about 149 - for the first time in a few weeks".

"It was a very dramatic increase and it has been an equally dramatic rate of decrease."

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