I hope everyone enjoyed the nice sunny bank holiday weekend and a big thank you to everyone who stayed at home.

A big thank you to those who were celebrating Eid at the end of Ramadan for staying at home; very much appreciated.

Also, thank you for following social distancing rules. We’re asked to stay two metres apart unless we are with a member of our own household; whether we are in our town centre shopping, or whether we are in our parks and our green spaces.

We’ve continued to close all of the outdoor gym areas, children’s play areas, skate parks, in order to stop the spread of the virus and we’re also asking people not to play team sports – football or cricket – in order to stop the spread of the virus.

We’ve now opened all of our car parks next to our parks, but, again I’d ask you to try not to travel in your cars to exercise or use our parks; use your local parks and green spaces and walk and cycle.

Also we’ve been trying to remind people of the two-metre social distancing rules by putting up signs in our town centres, on lampposts and also stencils on the ground.

It is really important that we follow these social distancing measures in order to stop the virus spreading.

We’ve also been widening some of our pavements by taking up unused road space. The latest example of this is on the Broadway in Ealing town centre on the southside, between Halfords and Marks & Spencer. We will be doing more of this, and also we are looking to provide more cycle lanes, so that more people can feel safe to cycle. More people are cycling as public transport has less capacity and what we don’t want to happen is for one public health crisis of COVID-19 to be replaced by another one, with really poor air quality caused by everyone jumping in their cars and pouring out polluted emissions and also causing congestion in our town centres.

So, we will be looking to put more cycle lanes in on a temporary basis throughout the borough focusing on the Uxbridge Road . We’ve identified over 200 temporary schemes either for cycling or walking also we are looking at low traffic neighbourhoods and also school streets outside our schools so that we can enable social distancing when children come to school and leave at the end of the day.

All of these things are going to help us to fight the virus, to stop it spreading and to stop a second deadly wave. So, please follow the social distancing rules, keep two metres apart and, if at all possible, continue to stay at home.