Matt Hancock has told MPs that the Tier 3 restrictions imposed before the second national lockdown in England were not strong enough. The Prime Minister has since unveiled beefed-up tiered restrictions which are due to come into place next month. Mr Hancock told a joint session of the Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee: “The trigger that persuaded me that we needed to go into national lockdown, having been essentially the architect of the tiered system and a big supporter of it, was that we saw case rates going up suddenly and quite sharply in almost every part of England."