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A new regulator aiming to curb the dominance of tech giants has started work in the UK.

The Digital Markets Unit (DMU) will first look to create new codes of conduct for companies such as Facebook and Google and their relationship with content providers and advertisers.

The new unit will be based inside the Competition and Markets Authority.

The regime will be “unashamedly pro-competition”, said the business secretary.

The DMU’s first job will be to think about codes of conduct to govern the relationships between the tech firms and their users, whether that is small businesses wanting to advertise or news organisations looking to distribute their journalism.

Between them, Facebook, Google and Amazon control the lion’s share of digital advertising revenue.

Before taking action, the new regulator will have to wait for such codes to be put into law.

Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said: “Today is a major milestone on the path to creating the world’s most competitive online markets, with consumers, entrepreneurs and content publishers at their heart.”

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the pro-competition regime would “help curb the dominance of the tech giants”.

Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the CMA, added: “People shopping on the internet and sharing information online should be able to enjoy the choice, secure data and fair prices that come with a dynamic and competitive industry.”

A smartphone with a microscope camera offering 60x magnification has been revealed by Chinese phone-maker Oppo.

BBC Click’s Chris Fox went hands-on with the Oppo Find X3 Pro to see what the microscope could capture – and whether it was useful or just a gimmick.

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has admitted that sanctions imposed on it by the US in 2019 have had a major impact on its mobile phone business.

The US took action amid claims that the company posed a security risk and last July, the UK said it would exclude the company from building its 5G network.

Growth elsewhere in the company meant that it did make a profit overall.

But chairman Ken Hu, referring to the impact of the sanctions, told the BBC: “It has caused a lot of damage to us.”

Mr Hu, speaking at the launch of Huawei’s 2020 report, called for a review of the global supply chain of critical technology.

Huawei has also tried to explain more about its ownership structure arguing that it will not allow interference from the Chinese state.

Mr Hu described 2020 as a year of challenges, with a significant hit to the mobile phone business and slowing revenue growth.

“Life was not easy for us,” he said.

Chinese strength
Strength in other sectors and in the Chinese market meant overall revenue was up 3.8% at $136.7bn (£99.3bn) and profits up by 3.2% at $9.9bn.

Mr Hu said restrictions had hurt US suppliers and global consumers as well as Huawei. “We think this is a very unfair situation,” he told the BBC at a press conference.

In response, the company has stockpiled chips, invested in research and development, and diversified its supplies.

It has also reportedly been developing its own chip production within China. Building domestic capacity for the most-advanced chips is currently a high priority for China.

There is currently a worldwide shortage of chips, and Mr Hu called for a “rethinking” and a “review” of the globalised semi-conductor supply chain.

US authorities have argued that using Huawei’s 5G equipment opens up countries to the possibilities of data being accessed by the Chinese state, or becoming vulnerable to being switched off.

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Huawei has defended its independence from the Chinese state by trying to explain its unusual model of ownership.

Jiang Xisheng, chief secretary of the board at Huawei, told the BBC that its employee-shareholders “will not allow external interference into the company’s operations”.

The company gave the BBC a remote video tour of the vault where more than 30 large cabinets contain records of the employees who own shares, listing when each individual bought them and for how much.

Critics have said the system is opaque, and is more of a profit-sharing scheme than a mechanism of real control.

Mr Jiang compared the model to the partnership model of UK department store John Lewis, arguing it means the interests of employees are closely bound up with those of the company and it shares in its success.

Ownership questions
Technically there are two owners of Huawei’s holding company – its founder Ren Zhengfei, who owns 0.9%, and a trade union body which owns the rest.

The company says the union is the platform for the more than 121,000 employees who own shares. These are not like normal shares, however. Non-Chinese staff are not allowed to own them and the shares cannot be publicly traded or kept when someone leaves.

Holding a share offers a chance to vote for the representative commission which is technically the highest authority in the company. Candidates come from within different sectors of the company, and staff can watch a recorded presentation before voting.

The process, Mr Jiang says, is competitive, although not as much as the US general election, he said when asked to compare it.

This commission selects the board of directors which report to it every year. Its reports have always been approved.

Mr Ren retains a veto over key issues, including candidates for the board of directors and a supervisory board. The model for this, Mr Jiang explains, is partly that of the British constitutional monarch. He says the veto is designed to be a “deterrent and constraint” rather than to be regularly exercised.

Mr Jiang joined the company in 1989, two years after it was founded, when it consisted of only about 40 staff.

He says the employee-ownership model came about to bring in capital as well as to attract and retain staff, and has allowed Huawei to focus on long-term research and development.

To try to emphasise the company’s openness, Mr Jiang picked up his phone during the interview to explain that all employees have an app on which they can post comments and ideas. He says that before our interview, he had seen one post that criticised him.Half of the 70 replies had backed the criticism and half had defended him, he said.

External critics, especially in the US, have argued that the representation committee is no more than a rubber-stamp and real power lies elsewhere, leaving the way open for hidden direction from the state.

That is an idea Mr Jiang seeks to dispel.

“For sure, we can say no to the state,” he told the BBC. “Even if some individual government officials wanted to intervene in our company’s operations we have the right to say no to that.”

‘Fake’ accounts claiming to be Amazon workers have been praising their working conditions on Twitter.

Votes are currently being counted in Alabama to decide whether Amazon warehouse workers will form a union.

But last night, a series of anti-union tweets were sent from accounts claiming to be staff.

Twitter has now suspended many of the accounts, and Amazon has confirmed at least one is fake.

Most of the accounts were made just a few days ago, often with only a few tweets, all related to Amazon.

“What bothers me most about unions is there’s no ability to opt out of dues,” one user under the handle @AmazonFCDarla tweeted, despite a state law in Alabama which prevents this.

“Amazon takes great care of me,” she added.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
View original tweet on Twitter
Another account – which later changed its profile picture after it was revealed to be fake – said: “Unions are good for some companies, but I don’t want to have to shell out hundreds a month just for lawyers!”Amazon FC
Many of the accounts involved used the handle @AmazonFC followed by a first name.

Amazon has previously used this handle for its so-called Amazon Ambassadors – real employees who are paid by the firm to promote and defend it on Twitter.

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An Amazon spokesperson told the BBC that Darla was not an official Ambassador, but has not responded to the BBC’s request for clarification on several other accounts.

“It appears that this is a fake account that violates Twitter’s terms,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve asked Twitter to investigate and take appropriate action.”

Fake accounts
Several of the high-profile accounts have been suspended by Twitter. It told the BBC that Amazon Ambassadors are subject to Twitter’s rules on spam and platform manipulation.

Accounts which impersonate or falsely claim to be affiliated with a company, can be temporarily suspended or removed.

Any parody account should have a disclaimer in its Twitter bio, the company added.

It is unclear whether the accounts are real employees, bots or trolls pretending to be Amazon Ambassadors.

Amazon hits back
Amazon’s executives and its official accounts have been tweeting in defence of the company in recent days, after negative reports of poor working conditions, including staff having to urinate in bottles.

The official Amazon News account tweeted: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.

“The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.”

In response to a tweet by US Democrat senator Elizabeth Warren, which accused Amazon of “exploiting loopholes and tax havens”, the account said:

“You make the tax laws, we just follow them. If you don’t like the laws you’ve created, by all means change them.

“Here are the facts: Amazon has paid billions of dollars in corporate taxes over the past few years alone.”

Cyber-security companies are warning about the rise of so-called ‘extortionware’ where hackers embarrass victims into paying a ransom.

Experts say the trend towards ransoming sensitive private information could affect companies not just operationally but through reputation damage.

It comes as hackers bragged after discovering an IT Director’s secret porn collection.

The targeted US firm has not publicly acknowledged that it was hacked.

In its darknet blog post about the hack last month, the cyber-criminal gang named the IT director whose work computer allegedly contained the files.

It also posted a screen grab of the computer’s file library which included more than a dozen folders catalogued under the names of porn stars and porn websites.

The infamous hacker group wrote: “Thanks God for [named IT Director]. While he was [masturbating] we downloaded several hundred gigabytes of private information about his company’s customers. God bless his hairy palms, Amen!”

The blog post has been deleted in the last couple of weeks, which experts say usually implies that the extortion attempt worked and the hackers have been paid to restore data, and not publish any more details.

The company did not respond to requests for comment.

The same hacker group is also currently trying to pressure another US utility company into paying a ransom, by posting an employee’s username and password for a members-only porn website.

‘The new norm’
Another ransomware group which also has a darknet website shows the use of similar tactics.

The relatively new gang has published private emails and pictures, and is calling directly for the mayor of a hacked municipality in the US to negotiate its ransom.

In another case, hackers claim to have found an email trail showing evidence of insurance fraud at a Canadian agriculture company.

Brett Callow, a threat analyst at cyber-security company Emsisoft, says the trend points to an evolution of ransomware hacking.

“This is the new norm. Hackers are now actually searching the data for information that can be weaponised. If they find anything that is incriminating or embarrassing, they’ll use it to leverage a larger pay-out. These incidents are no longer simply cyber-attacks about data, they are full-out extortion attempts.”

Another example of this was seen in December 2020, when the cosmetic surgery chain The Hospital Group was held to ransom with the threat of publication of ‘before and after’ images of patients.

Ransomware is evolving
Ransomware has evolved considerably since it first appeared decades ago.

Criminals used to operate alone, or in small teams, targeting individual internet users at random by booby-trapping websites and emails.

In the last few years, they’ve become more sophisticated, organised and ambitious.

Criminal gangs are estimated to be making tens of millions of dollars a year, by spending time and resources targeting and attacking large companies or public bodies for huge pay-outs, sometimes totalling millions of dollars.

Brett Callow has been following ransomware tactics for years, and says he saw another shift in methods in late 2019.

“It used to be the case that the data was just encrypted to disrupt a company, but then we started seeing it downloaded by the hackers themselves.

“It meant they could charge victims even more because the threat of selling the data on to others was strong.”

Tough to defend against
This latest trend of threatening to publicly damage an organisation or individual has particularly concerned experts because it is hard to defend against.

Keeping good backups of company data helps businesses to recover from crippling ransomware attacks, but that is not enough when the hackers use extortionware tactics.Cyber-security consultant Lisa Ventura said: “Employees should not be storing anything that could harm a firm reputationally on company servers. Training around this should be provided by organisations to all their staff.

“It’s a troubling shift in angle for the hackers because ransomware attacks are not only getting more frequent, they are also getting more sophisticated.

“By identifying factors such as reputational damage, it offers far more leverage to extort money from victims.”

A lack of victim reporting and a culture of cover-up makes estimating the overall financial cost of ransomware difficult.

Experts at Emsisoft estimate that ransomware incidents in 2020 cost as much as $170bn (£123bn) in ransom payments, downtime and disruption.

A firm that has the registered details of more than nine million chipped pets across the UK has been accused of losing its customers’ data.

Petlog is requesting that all users create a new account, but is not explaining why they need to do so.

One dog owner told the BBC he had logged on and received the details of someone else with the same name, including a phone number and address.

Petlog told the BBC pet information was safe.

In a statement the firm said: “We reassure all customers that their pets are safely on our microchip database.

“There are some customers who may be unable to immediately view their pets’ details when they set up their new online account, but this is because we are committed to protecting their data, and we want to verify details, in some cases, before we continue the online set up process.

“This is no way affects the reunification process, in the event of a pet going missing and the data is still safely on our microchipping database, which can be accessed 24/7 by our authorised network.”

David Plant contacted the BBC after he saw messages on a Facebook group suggesting that Petlog had lost customer data and needed everyone to re-register.

He went on the website and typed his name in – but instead of being matched to his springer spaniel, Sally, he was provided with the details of another man with the same name, and his dog, Max. The details included the address and mobile phone number.

“This seems like a massive breach of GDPR (data-protection regulations),” Mr Plant told the BBC. “In theory I could register his dog to my address and claim him as mine.”

He said numerous messages and calls to Petlog had gone unanswered.

Another said the situation was creating “chaos for pet owners”.

“Probably thousands of pets with microchips inserted are no longer registered, leaving owners unable to be reunited with stolen or lost pets and are completely unaware of this,” Chris Boston told the BBC.

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Professor of law at Newcastle University, Lilian Edwards, believes what has happened represents a breach of GDPR rules that should have been reported to the information commissioner’s office (ICO).

“It sounds like a massive database issue and [it] obviously contained personal data, so it is a breach and they should have notified the Information Commissioner’s Office within three days,” she said.

“They are not handling it very well and that is surprising because people are very attached to their pets.”

The ICO said it had no record of such a breach, although it said that not all such incidents needed to be reported.

Petlog said that it had found no evidence of a GDPR breach.

One BBC reporter checked the details of their cat, Smudge, on the database and was unable to re-register its chip.

The site said: “Your pet’s details have not been lost. We just need to clean up some of your data first.”

The Petlog website added: “Our online services and website have been upgraded to ensure the database is secure. All data has been safely and securely migrated. As you may not have added your details to the database in the first instance, some of our security questions may not immediately match.”

Missing dogs
In the FAQ section, Petlog explained that for some customers with new details, such as a different email address, the process would take longer.

“Customers can fill in the ‘can’t see my pet’ form within their online account so the system can match their record and their new details with their pet’s record,” it said.

The firm added: “We understand this might be concerning, but we can give our reassurance that all pets are still safely on our microchip database and in the event of a pet going missing, reunification [sic] won’t be affected.”

But on its Facebook page, people disputed this.

“Two dogs found on M6 and couldn’t have their microchips details passed on as they weren’t on the system,” wrote one.

Many others said they had had difficulties re-registering, with some saying they no longer had a record of their pet’s chip ID.

“This is a complete and utter disgrace,” wrote one customer on Petlog’s Facebook group, asking why she had found out about the issues on social media.

“Petlog should have immediately contacted all customers directly to speed up correction of this dire cock-up.”

Kate Bevan, editor of Which? Computing magazine and a cat owner, said: “It’s concerning to discover that Petlog has apparently failed to keep track of the personal information of its customers and of the details of their beloved pets.

“All organisations are required by law to protect user information. Petlog must resolve the problems as a matter of urgency.”

Pet theft soars
Twitter account Missing Pets GB urged all owners to check their accounts immediately.

Petlog is managed by the UK Kennel Club, which in January issued a statement apologising for issues arising from the “implementation of our new database”.

At the time, chief executive Mark Beazley blamed the switchover to a new system for a range of problems and delays that customers were experiencing.

“I give you my assurance that we will resolve the remaining customer-service issues and offer further online improvements,” he said at the time.

Pet ownership has rocketed during the Covid pandemic, with UK households buying 3.2 million pets since it began, according to the Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association.

Pet theft has also increased during lockdowns, prompting campaigners to urge the government to introduce tougher penalties for the crime.

Phone companies must do more to stop fraudsters who spoof phone numbers to trap victims. one of the UK’s top law enforcement officers has said.

Graeme Biggar, director general of the National Crime Agency’s National Economic Crime Centre, says the UK needs “a step change in our response” to fraud.

It costs the economy up to £190bn each year.

Phone companies say they are committed to taking action over nuisance calls.

Mr Biggar says there has been an “explosion” in the number of criminals spoofing phone numbers in the past 12 months.

“Phone companies have been used for fraud since they’ve been invented and it’s a constant arms race to stop vulnerabilities and then stop them.

“With HMRC scams alone, more than 2,700 numbers have been taken out of circulation after they’ve been reported, but there is definitely a lot more that the phone companies need to do and can do.”

His comments are backed up by a recent report from industry body UK Finance, which suggests the number of reported cases of impersonation fraud – including spoof calls – last year nearly doubled to 40,000.

However, the real figure is likely to be much higher, because many victims won’t report fraud to their bank or building society, or even tell their family or friends, because of feelings of embarrassment or guilt.

Earlier this year, the level of fraud in the UK was labelled a “threat to national security”.

What is number spoofing?
The communications watchdog, Ofcom, describes number spoofing as people who deliberately change the telephone number and the name that is relayed as the Caller ID information.

“They do this to either hide their identity or to try to mimic the number of a real company or person who has nothing to do with the real caller,” explains Ofcom on its website.

“For example, identity thieves who want to steal sensitive information such as your bank account or login details, sometimes use spoofing to pretend they’re calling from your bank or credit card company.”

Ope Oladejo, a 21-year-old law student, had nearly £2,000 stolen from her last summer – money she’d been saving whilst working as a carer for help pay for a law course.

“The number spoofing was the most important part [of the deception],” she tells the BBC.

“At first I was a bit sceptical…but they said: ‘Check the number [we’re calling you on] on the back of your card’.

“I checked and it matched and that’s when I let my guard down completely.”

Because the criminals had convinced Ope she was speaking to her bank, they were able to get key details and information from her, which allowed them to steal the money.

Thankfully, the money was refunded by Ope’s bank and she has been able to continue her studies, but she says the incident hit her hard.

“Emotionally it just made me really sad, I just cried a lot about it,” she says.

“Financially I think it made me smarter… I basically ignore any phone calls I’ve not got saved as they might be a spoof.”

The BBC approached Mobile UK, which represents the four big mobile phone companies, as well as BT, for comment.

The mobile operators and BT said they were committed to taking action against nuisance calls and to working with Ofcom and law enforcement bodies to reduce the threat.

They added that they take customers’ security very seriously and advised people to hang up straight away if they are suspicious about any call.

You can hear more on BBC Radio 4’s Money Box programme on Saturday at 12pm on Radio 4 or by listening again here shortly after broadcast.

OneWeb has put up another 36 satellites, taking its in-orbit constellation to 146 spacecraft.

The new platforms were lofted by a Soyuz rocket from Russia’s far east.

The additions will enable engineers to further test the company’s promised system for delivering broadband internet connections from space.

OneWeb is now owned principally by the Indian conglomerate Bharti Global and the UK government after they bought the enterprise out of bankruptcy last year.

The new management anticipates offering a commercial service this autumn to northern latitudes – including Britain, Northern Europe, Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and Arctic Seas – with a full global roll-out of connectivity in mid-2022.

“We have what we call ‘five to 50’ (degrees latitude). So, that’s five launches we need to do in order to get to this coverage of basically the south coast of the UK to the North Pole,” explained chief executive Neil Masterson.

“By the end of June we will have completed those launches to enable us to be providing our service. But in total this year, we expect to be doing somewhere between eight and 10 launches,” he told BBC News.

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Mr Masterson, formerly the co-chief operating officer at business information provider Thomson Reuters, was brought into OneWeb when it emerged from “Chapter 11” bankruptcy protection in November.

There has been an intense period of hires, with more than 200 employees joining the books since the autumn.

Supply chains have also had to be re-established, allowing OneWeb Satellites, the joint venture with Airbus, to resume full-volume manufacturing at its factory in Florida.

And all this has required extra funding, of course.

OneWeb announced in January it had raised a further $400m from tech investor Softbank and satellite services specialist Hughes Network Systems. But this still leaves OneWeb short of about $1bn to finish the set-up of its first-generation constellation of 648 satellites.

Those spacecraft also need an array of supporting ground stations dotted around the globe.

“We need one more ground station to fully support commercial service in the areas mentioned by the end of this year,” the chief executive said.

“We know where it’s going to be. Covid makes it a little bit more tricky, but I think we feel confident at this stage, we’ll get it done.”

OneWeb says its testing programme is progressing well, and in a demonstration this month for the US Department of Defense claimed its satellites were providing downlink data rates of up to 500 megabits per second with a delay, or latency, in the internet connections as low as 32 milliseconds.

OneWeb’s chief competitor in the internet mega-constellation business is Starlink, which is being set up by the Californian rocket company SpaceX.

Starlink, which has 1,320 satellites in orbit now after another launch on Wednesday (the architecture of its network requires more satellites than OneWeb) has already begun beta testing with high-latitude customers.

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The two projects are, though, following quite different business models.

OneWeb will be working with partner telecommunications companies to deliver its broadband offering, whereas Starlink will be selling a big chunk of its bandwidth direct to the consumer.

Some way behind both OneWeb and Starlink are Lightspeed and Kuiper.

Lightspeed is the broadband mega-constellation being developed by the long-established Canadian satellite communications company Telesat. This system has only just selected a spacecraft manufacturer in the Franco-Italian aerospace company Thales Alenia Space. The first of Lightspeed’s 298 satellites won’t launch for another two years.

Kuiper is a subsidiary of online retailer Amazon. Like Starlink, the Kuiper constellation will comprise several thousand satellites but details of a launch schedule have not been released.

There are tentative proposals in the EU also for a communications mega-constellation.

In the UK, the government’s purchase of a stake in OneWeb has been controversial, especially with an early suggestion that the constellation could be fashioned into some sort replacement for the EU’s Galileo navigation system which Britain no longer has a stake in after Brexit.

It was confirmed this week that OneWeb has answered the Request for Information now being run in government to find solutions to the country’s needs for precise Positioning, Navigation and Timing, or PNT.

But this is likely, certainly in the short term, to take the form of resilience support. In other words, using OneWeb to bolster the signals coming from Galileo and its American counterpart, GPS.

Mr Masterson says his team are thinking about the services they could offer in the future, especially when OneWeb introduces a second generation of spacecraft – the manufacture of which will have a lot more British involvement.

Carissa Christensen, the chief executive of consultancy Bryce Space and Technology, discussed OneWeb on a recent edition of the BBC’s Bottom Line business programme.

She said: “The UK has targeted space as a driver of economic growth. OneWeb is in a very exclusive club with regard to space capabilities and space activities, and so for me there’s some alignment in that decision to become an investor in OneWeb with that vision of space driving a post-Brexit UK economic boom.

“I don’t want to overstate that as saying, ‘clearly that’s going to work’. But it’s taking on an opportunity and it’s a bold decision.”

Criminals and paedophiles are trying to groom and exploit young siblings as part of an emerging trend of online sexual abuse, experts have warned.

The Internet Watch Foundation said victims ranged from 3-16 years, with some groomed to copy adult pornography.

It found 511 examples involving siblings between September and December – roughly one in 30 instances of all “self-generated content” in that time.

Campaigners say livestreaming services need to do more to protect children.

The IWF, which works with police and websites worldwide to take down harmful material, said the Covid-19 pandemic had been a “perfect storm” for the abuse.

Its chief executive, Susie Hargreaves, said there had been:

a greater demand for abusive content
an increase in the amount of time spent online by children
a rise in the use of livestreaming platforms
There was a “common myth” abuse involving siblings was limited to poorer countries – but most of the videos the IWF found featured children in the West, including from the UK, US and across Europe.

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Grooming often begins on social-media and gaming platforms, before offenders encourage children on to video-chat or livestreaming services where the abuse then escalates.

And abuse of siblings typically involves an older child being coerced into abusing their younger brother or sister.

One video, shared online multiple times, involved a brother and sister aged six and three being given instructions by an abuser, the IWF said.

‘Heinous offenders’
Last December, the government set out its proposed Online Harms Bill, designed to ensure companies provide improved safeguarding measures.

It plans to give watchdog Ofcom the power to:

block access to online services that fail to protect users
fine technology companies
The proposals contained the “strongest protections” for children, Safeguarding Minister Victoria Atkins told BBC News.

“Encouraging siblings to enact sexual abuse demonstrates just how heinous offenders are in this space,” she added.

NSPCC online-safety-policy head Andy Burrows said it could be a “world-leading piece of legislation” but must follow through with its promise to give Ofcom “teeth” to step in and take action.

In the past year, in the race to bring video-chat and livestreaming services to market, some technology companies had prioritised profit over making their platforms safe, the charity said.

And Mr Burrows raised particular concerns over Facebook’s plans to introduce end-to-end encryption – a way of sending information so only the intended receiver can read it – across all of its messenger services.

‘Anti-abuse measures’
Plans to include it in its video-chat service, Rooms, launched in May, would “significantly compromise the ability to detect child abuse”, he said.

The National Crime Agency said the changes would “dramatically reduce [Facebook’s] ability to provide law-enforcement with the evidence they need” to prosecute alleged offenders.

Facebook said the rollout of end-to-end encryption was “a long-term project”, adding: “We are committed to building strong anti-abuse measures into our plans.

“Facebook will continue to lead the industry in developing new ways to prevent, detect and respond to abuse.”

For information and support for those affected, visit the BBC’s Action Line.

Supermarkets can sell non-essential items and garden centres can open in Wales from Monday in a further slight easing of Covid lockdown rules.

Shops that have already been open, but had non-essential aisles cordoned off, can now sell anything, but shops that only sell non-essential items will remain closed until 12 April.

Garden centres will open their doors to customers for the first time since lockdown began in December.

Shops must have strict Covid protocols.

They are the latest restrictions to be lifted as Wales’ coronavirus case rate has fallen below 50 per 100,000 people and the national Covid positivity rate is below 5% – both under the lockdown threshold.

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All primary and some secondary school children have returned to the classroom while four people from two different households can now meet outdoors, including in gardens, as the stay-at-home rule was relaxed to a stay local one.

First Minister Mark Drakeford and the Welsh government have also said more industries could be reopened or considered for reopening if Covid cases rates and test positivity rates remained low.

What restrictions could be lifted?
From 27 March, if case rates remain low:

Libraries and self-contained accommodation could reopen, but you can only holiday with people from your own household
Organised children’s activities could restart
Stay local restrictions could be lifted
From 12 April, if case rates remain low:

All shops and remaining close-contact services could resume
On 22 April

Ministers will consider when gyms and outdoor hospitality in Wales can reopen in its lockdown review

After hairdressers reopened for appointments last week, the reopening of non-essential aisles in supermarkets and garden centres welcoming customers is Wales’ latest step towards reopening after being shut for three months.

‘Gardening important for mental health’
Justin Williams is looking forward to opening Fron Goch Garden Centre near Caernarfon and believes services like his can help people’s wellbeing.

“Gardening is important for mental health,” he said.

“It’s important to have an outside or inside space for growing plants or vegetables. It’s something to do with the kids but also something for people of any age to get involved with. It also encourages people to stay home and be safe.”

Garden centre bosses across Wales have been frustrated being shut while centres in England have remained open.

“We were frustrated this hadn’t been recognised in Wales like in England but are happy that’s changing now,” Mr Williams added.

“There’s been a lot of interest in us opening. People have been quite lonely without much support, it will be good to get people out and see guests in the garden.”

What about non-essential retail?
Many non-essential retailers thought they would be allowed to open when hairdressers did on 15 March, but were “frustrated and disappointed” they could not open until English non-essential retailers did on 12 April.

Welsh ministers said the move to allow supermarkets to start selling non-essential items again while other shops remain shut was seen as “the least risky” Covid rules relaxation as supermarkets were already open.

The Welsh Retail Consortium previously said the industry was losing £100m in revenue every week while non-essential shops such as clothes outlets and bookshops were shut.

Chepstow Bookshop in Monmouthshire will not be able to open next week while the supermarket and high street newsagents nearby will be allowed to sell non-essentials items such as books.

“I can understand why the Welsh government has done it,” said Matt Taylor, who has owned the 40-year-old book store for 15 years.

“It’s great we’ve been on a level playing field for so long, although there are a few frustrations.”

Mr Taylor’s shop, which has been shut for six of the past 12 months, offers click and collect and home delivery home but he estimates trade is “two-thirds” of what it was the previous year while “working twice as hard”.

“The thing people seem to miss the most about coming into independent shops like ours is customers not knowing what they want, it’s that browsing experience. And in this pandemic, books have given people a refuge or an escape from it all.”

Monmouthshire has the third-lowest Covid case rate of Wales’ 22 local authorities – behind Ceredigion and Bridgend – and Leeann Davies, who owns Village Treats in Magor, was “gutted” her sweet shop didn’t open at the same time as hairdressers.

“It seems like along with the pubs and restaurants, we’re the only ones not open,” she said.

“Some of these supermarkets are getting record profits as they’ve no competition whereas even when we’re open, we don’t have the amount of customers they do – and we have strict Covid procedures.

“But I understand we’re non-essential and you can’t differentiate between my little shop and a big store in a city centre.”Mr Davies said her her business would not have survived the coronavirus crisis without government support – but does have hope for the future.

“After the first lockdown and, as so many people are working from home, we were the busiest we’d ever been,” she said.

“Communities have really got behind supporting local businesses and if more people continue to work from home after the pandemic, maybe local shops like ours may have a really encouraging futures.”