Coffee House Shots is sponsored by NatWest Group, principal banking partner of the Global Climate Change Summit, COP26, in Glasgow later this year.

NatWest is helping its customers reduce their carbon emissions by joining forces with organisations like Microsoft,

identifying energy-saving methods for small and medium enterprises.

Find out more about their approach to climate change at natwestgroup.com.

Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Cindy Yu, and I'm joined by Kate Andrews and

Fraser Nelson. So later today, we'll be hearing from the Prime Minister on what of the roadmap

will be confirmed and the brave new future we're going to be going into the rest of this year.

But what has already been confirmed overnight is that mass testing will be one of the key

pillars of the new normal

in quotation marks. Kate, can you tell us about what the government has already announced?

So it's been announced that everybody in England will be offered two rapid COVID tests,

lateral flow tests a week, and that you get those results back very quickly. Now, if you have a positive, you are then

asked to self-isolate along with the rest of your family or household. And then you apply for a

PCR test, which is thought to be a more thorough test. Now, if you take that test and the result

comes back negative, then your quarantine comes to an end. If it comes back positive, then you

are thought to be positive with coronavirus and you go through the normal quarantine process.

Now, this is important for several reasons. First of all, whilst the idea here is that it's going to try to target clusters of outbreaks, potentially even try to look for new variants, I think in reality, a lot of this is a step towards a vaccine passport

style system because we know that by the time we get to summer, whilst every adult is going

to be offered their first jab, and we're still on track for that, many millions of people will not

have had their second jab. And if the idea is that in order to access major parts of society,

you have to prove your vaccination status or your health status, the idea is that you order to access major parts of society, you have to prove your

...