All systems go for Tuesday's Leicester meeting despite localised lockdown threat

Tuesday's meeting at Leicester is still scheduled to go ahead despite concern that the city may be the first place in the UK to be locally locked down.

Leicester has had a spike in coronavirus cases in June and five schools have been closed as a result.

Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, Home Secretary Priti Patel said it was "correct" that the government was considering a lockdown in Leicester.

But Leicester clerk of the course Jimmy Stevenson said he had not received any contact about a lockdown and it was currently business as usual.

He said: "No-one's been in touch with us so that's a good thing and we'll presume there's no problem. We're still planning for the meeting on Tuesday.

More than 650 people in Leicester were found to have had coronavirus in the first two weeks of June, which is a quarter of all cases in the city so far.

Leicester City Council revealed that areas in the north and east of the city have been particularly impacted. North Evington has been the most affected in the city with 118 cases, and is just a few miles from the racecourse in Oadby.

Leicester: Tuesday meeting still set to go ahead behind-closed-doorsCredit: Edward Whitaker

But Stevenson said: "Evington is about three or four miles away from us and is a pretty condensed area. It's not like where we are here."

Patel stated on Sunday that four mobile testing units had been deployed to the city. She said: "There will be support going into Leicester and the Health Secretary [Matt Hancock] was in touch with many of us over the weekend explaining some of the measures, the support on testing, resources that will go into the local authority as well."

Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe has backed the introduction of a localised lockdown in order to stop the spread of coronavirus.

She said: "We know the problem is in Leicester East, not spread across the city. People from Leicester East need to be not travelling across the city. I don’t know how it would work but they have to implement a local lockdown.

"In my view, we need to go back to the standard of lockdown we had at the beginning."

Leicester's meeting on Tuesday evening is a nine-race card consisting entirely of Class 6 handicaps. There have been 106 declarations.

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