Ministers are looking at bringing in annual health checks for workers and allowing more hospitality staff to come from abroad in an effort to deal with labour shortages.

The plans could involve giving companies subsidies for occupational health services to prevent workers going off long-term sick, as part of the government’s review of the workforce to be unveiled alongside the budget this month.

Ministers have also asked the Migration Advisory Committee for advice on whether the hospitality, construction and retail industries should be on the list of sectors where there is a shortage of workers, helping them to recruit from overseas.

It is thought hospitality workers are the most likely to be put on the list, which makes it easier for staff to get jobs from abroad.

Jeremy Hunt ordered the workforce review amid concerns the economy is being held back by shortages of workers that have emerged since the pandemic and Brexit.

The health check plans, first reported by the Sunday Times, would form part of the workforce review conducted by the Department for Work and Pensions with input from the Department of Health and Social Care.

It was launched in an attempt to understand why there are about 600,000 more “economically inactive” people of working age than before the pandemic.

Some care homes have “no choice” but to allow workers who have Covid to deliver care, a public health official said.

According to Public Health England cases are rising the fastest in Somerset.

As a result, care homes in the county are struggling to safely staff their services and schools are seeing a rise in staff sickness.

Somerset Council said ensuring vulnerable residents received care was “lower risk” than them being infected.

Health officials advised care workers to continue working only if they wore PPE and felt well enough.

Council public health consultant Alison Bell said: “In some cases, we have no choice but to have people who are testing positive delivering care to people in Somerset.

“That risk is actually less than that person not receiving care.”

She said the Omicron variant was more transmissible and people were getting re-infected with it, some within a matter of weeks.

“The knock-on effect of there being so much Covid is that workers that we really need to deliver essential services are getting sick,” Ms Bell added.

She said some schools in the county had had to go to remote learning due to an increase in staff sickness.

“Its really difficult to manage at the moment,” she added.

More than 80% of GPs believe that patients are being put at risk when they come into their surgery for an appointment, a new survey shows.

A poll of 1,395 GPs found only 13% said their practice was safe for patients all the time. Meanwhile, 85% expressed concerns about patient safety, with 2% saying patients were “rarely” safe, 22% saying they were safe “some of the time” and 61% saying they were safe “most of the time”.

Asked if they thought the risk to patient safety was increasing in their surgery, 70% said it was.

Family doctors identified lack of time with patients, workforce shortages, relentless workloads and heavy administrative burdens as the main reasons people receiving care could be exposed to risk. The survey, which was self-selecting, also found that:

• 91% said more GPs would help improve the state of general practices.
• 84% have had anxiety, stress or depression over the past year linked to their job.
• 31% know a colleague who was physically abused by a patient in the last year.
• 24% know of a member of general practice staff who has taken their own life due to work pressures.

“The evidence shows that, after you’ve already made 25 to 35 decisions about patients’ health on a particular day, that as a GP the risk of making a bad decision goes up,” said Dr Kieran Sharrock, a GP in Lincolnshire and the deputy chair of the British Medical Association’s GP committee.

The country is “in a different world” from when the Covid pandemic started, Boris Johnson has said, meaning the last remaining restrictions can begin to be lifted from next week.

Ahead of an announcement on Monday about the government’s “living with Covid” strategy, the prime minister signalled free mass testing would end imminently and told people to return to the office and “get their confidence back”.

“We’ve reached a stage where we think you can shift the balance away from state mandation – away from banning certain courses of action, compelling certain courses of action – in favour of encouraging personal responsibility,” he said on Sunday.

Concerns have been raised by some scientists and health experts about the mooted plans to drop the legal requirement for people to self-isolate, scrap the majority of free lateral flow tests and end most contact tracing.

Johnson did not rule out restrictions being re-imposed. He said: “I don’t want to go back to that kind of non-pharmaceutical intervention. I want to be able to address the problems of the pandemic with a vaccine-led approach … but I’m afraid you’ve got to be humble in the face of nature.”

Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, told the same programme that the move “seems very premature” and used the analogy of a football team being one goal ahead and then taking off their best defender in the closing minutes of the game.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have explored how the pandemic has impacted the shopping habits and attitudes of consumers aged 65+ living and shopping in rural communities in the South of England.

A series of practical recommendations to encourage older shoppers in rural areas back into local stores in the wake of COVID-19 have emerged from research commissioned by the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise (NICRE).

The research found that while many older shoppers were already returning to use rural retail stores, the majority also had similar concerns and apprehensions that prevented it being a ‘normal’ experience. For others, at the time of the survey in summer 2021, physical shopping remained a step too far, often for one or more of the reasons that were also inhibiting those who had already returned.

The findings led to seven recommendations for stores to help welcome more older shoppers back, make those who already had feel more comfortable, and encourage an improved experience for customers:

• Simply recognise that pandemic fear persists
• Maintain a physical distance
• Offer multiple modes of payment to reduce anxiety
• Encourage and facilitate [even more] personalised service interactions
• Mitigate against merchandise contamination
• Ask for feedback (and listen)
• Go the extra (delivery) mile

The chairman of Britain’s biggest supermarket chain has warned that “the worst is yet to come” on food price inflation, as he predicted it will soon hit 5%.

John Allan, who has chaired Tesco since 2015, told the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme that he was well aware people on very tight budgets were having to choose between food and heating. He said the idea that this was happening was very troubling.

Overall inflation currently stands at 5.4%, a 30-year high, and is predicted to top 6% in the spring, just one element of the cost of living crisis facing UK households. Poverty groups have warned about the impending threat to those on the lowest incomes.

“In some ways the worst is still to come – because although food price inflation in Tesco last quarter was only 1%, we are impacted by rising energy prices. Our suppliers are impacted by rising energy prices. We’re doing all we can to offset it … but that’s the sort of number we’re talking about. Of course, 5%,” he said.

Allan admitted some people would “of course” have less to spend on luxuries, as the price hikes coincide with a rise in national insurance contributions and the £693 increase in the average family’s annual energy bill, to £1,971, both of which come into effect in April.

The government’s failure to enable local politicians to meet virtually is hampering councils, worrying older councillors and shutting out new participants, according to Jackie Weaver, who shot to fame thanks to a video clip of an ill-tempered council meeting 10 months ago.

Weaver, who became one of the most unlikely breakout stars of 2021 after footage from the Handforth parish council meeting she was attending went viral, has issued the rallying cry amid fears that current high infection rates could hit participation in local politics hard.

In April the high court ruled that from May council meetings in England must take place in person – after coronavirus restrictions which allowed virtual meetings lapsed.

“It is completely unreasonable that we are having to cancel council meetings or hold them only in emergencies for goodness knows how long. Where is democracy?” said Weaver in an interview conducted, inevitably, over Zoom.

This week Lawyers in Local Government the Association of Democratic Services Officers (ADSO) launched a petition calling for councils to be allowed to meet remotely because “they know best” what type of meetings work in their area.

After a tumultuous 10 months in which Weaver, the chief officer of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils, has played herself in the Archers, opened the Brit awards as “Weaver the Cleaver” and featured on Celebrity Mastermind, she is also calling for legislation that will, once again, allow council meetings to be held online.

The public can only hope that it will lead to more filmed exchanges like the Handforth meeting that gripped the nation in the dark days of last February’s lockdown, when Weaver was commanded by Aled’s iPad to: “Read the standing orders, read them and understand them!”

UK residents are hoarding an estimated £50m in loose change, with little sign of it all being spent as Covid restrictions ease.

Nearly six in 10 people are holding coins at home, according to a survey by banking trade body UK Finance.

People tend to hold on to 1p, 2p, 5p and 10p coins.

The findings have prompted pleas for this money to be given to charity, as cash donations dropped during the Covid crisis.

UK Finance data suggests that people have been holding on to cash three times longer than they used to owing, in part, to the coronavirus lockdowns.

An estimated 8 million people in England with mental health problems cannot get specialist help because they are not considered sick enough to qualify, NHS leaders have revealed as the toll of the pandemic is laid bare.

The figure, drawn up by mental health trusts and NHS Providers, underlines the gap between the growing need for care for anxiety, depression and other mental health problems, and the ability of the NHS to treat them.

It is in addition to the official waiting list for NHS mental health care, which stands at 1.6 million people, including 374,000 under-18s.

NHS England is understood to view the figure of 8 million, which is based on the known prevalence of mental health conditions and the thresholds dictating who gets access to treatment, as an accurate assessment of the number of those who are missing out on care because services are already so busy, especially given the Covid pandemic’s damage to mental wellbeing.

The devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have called on the UK government to rethink plans to end the universal credit uplift.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak plans to stop the extra £20-a-week payment in October – saying it is only temporary measure to help people through the pandemic.

But there are growing calls for it to be extended or made permanent.

Ministers from Holyrood, Cardiff and Stormont have raised concerns about the impact the cut will have on poverty.

They wrote a joint letter to Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey, describing the change as the “biggest overnight reduction to a basic rate of social security since the modern welfare state began, more than 70 years ago”.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said last week he wanted the focus to be on better paid jobs, rather than welfare. He was speaking after two Tory MPs joined calls for the uplift to be made permanent.