Hitchin's well-respected local councillor Judi Billing is a popular figure in our town and county.

For decades Judi's tireless campaigning to help people in our community has been legendary - helping many in our town for a raft of reasons.

So, when the leader of the Labour group at Herts County Council and the Labour spokesperson for education, libraries and localism speaks, many listen.

Following on from Boris Johnson's Downing Street press conference on the tightening of restrictions once again and what it could mean for Hitchin - as Nub News reported live - here is Judi's must-read take on the government's handling of the Covid crisis as she takes the PM and health secretary Matt Hancock to task for their response to the pandemic.

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It's hard to know just at the moment which part of government is the most inept at understanding the needs of ordinary people trying to get on with their lives, feed house and educate their families at this massively difficult time.

'Let's reorganise local government' they cry apparently failing to realise that its local government which has been doing all the heavy lifting since March, helping people apply for grants, making sure vulnerable shielding people get the food they need and looking after our public health in terms of testing, school returns and making sure that social distancing is possible in out businesses, restaurants and town centres.

Of course the government was far too slow to realise the seriousness of the situation back in March - but at least gave some clear messages that we could understand about staying at home and saving lives.

But then we realised that those messages didn't apply to government ministers or their unelected all powerful friends and it was when Dominic Cummings told us about his trip to Barnard Castle with a child in his car to test his eyesight that all trust and faith in Johnson's shower of appalling ministers was made complete and irreversible.

Since then we have been told that our responses to things that we really need like test, track and trace have been world class and world leading when it has been abundantly clear that they are totally failing to do the job they were set up for and as recently as this week people have been told to travel hundreds of miles with Covid symptoms to get a basic test!

For months the NHS and care home staff were starved of the PPE they needed to save themselves and their patients whilst ministered dabbled in absurd contracts - which led to either no delivery or totally substandard supplies being procured at great cost.

Since then we have had somewhere between eight and 13 U-turns depending how you count them about vital issues from sorting out GCSE and A level results to whether or not we should be wearing face coverings in various settings. On some days some policies changed a number of times.

For me the last straw was yesterday when I hear the appalling Matt Hancock, secretary of state for health and social care arguing on radio and TV that the reasons why our testing regime is in a terrible mess is that too many people are asking for tests.

We are stuck with this government for a while unfortunately but those of us who have responsibility at local level for our constituents will continue to do all we can to protect people and make sure that they are healthy, housed, fed, educated and well.

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