The Leicester lockdown is set to be extended as the coronavirus rate in the city is deemed still too high.

In Leicester, the rate has fallen slightly from 117.7 in the seven days to July 3 to 114.3 in the seven days to July 10.

It was 156.8 in the seven days to June 26.

The figures, which are for the seven days to July 10, are based on tests carried out in laboratories (pillar one of the Government's testing programme) and in the wider community (pillar two).

The rate is expressed as the new number of new cases per 100,000 population.

A police car in Leicester city centre after the Health Secretary Matt Hancock imposed a local lockdown

Jonathan Van-Tam, The Deputy Chief Medical Office for England, said:  "The situation has improved but it needs to go further.

"With any of these things, usually the way that one approaches them from a public health perspective is to take a phased approach.

"Normally you don't just go from having the brakes on heavily to just taking the brakes off completely."

Mayor Sir Peter told BBC Breakfast that, having "finally" been provided with "useful data", it was known that around 10% of the city has recorded a higher transmission of the virus.

He said: "If we had known that weeks ago, we could've actually dealt with it at that time and prevented this lockdown.

"It's very clear, when you look at the data, that it's a couple of areas of the city that have got a higher than the average transmission of the virus, and certainly the way in which the city has been locked down in its entirety, and indeed beyond our boundary, is not justified."

He added: "Even now we're getting it (the data), it doesn't have some of the vital stuff that we need, particularly in a city like Leicester.

"We need to know the ethnicity of the people who are being tested, we need to know where they are working. There's been all this talk about perhaps it's passed on in factories, but we have no way of knowing that."

Leicester is the UK's first local lockdown after a spike in Covid-19 cases

Asked if he hoped the lockdown restrictions would be lifted soon, he said: "I very much hope so, yes."

But he added: "It was clear from discussions we were having last week with them (the Department of Health) that they haven't yet got a clue of how on earth they're going to measure what constitutes success in this."