Whitby cafe to continue safety measures after restrictions ease
It's as the Prime Minister's expected to make an announcement later.
A Whitby cafe director says they are going to continue implementing safety measures.
It is as the Prime Minister expected to say later that final coronavirus restrictions will be lifted in England from next Monday.
It is understood Boris Johnson will announce wearing masks will no longer be a legal requirement but there will be new guidance around them.
Lois Mee is from Hetty and Betty and said:
"The cleaning measures we do already anyway but things such as we set up a counter near our front door where we can do track and trace to stop people sort of coming and seating themselves, we're going to carry on with that. We're going to continue just doing purely table service because what we've found is that our staff find it easier to manage the floor in that way.
"We've already had a meeting about masks and our staff are voluntarily choosing to keep their face masks. We are going to ask customers whether or not they want to wear them, we're not going to enforce but if they wish to wear them then we're going to encourage it because it's just to help us keep the infection rates down.
"The vast majority of customers have been quite accommodating, you know they've happily done track and trace, worn face masks and quite a few have shown a preference for the table service anyway but we have had odd occasions where people haven't wanted to comply so either they've not wanted to give their details for track and trace or they've not wanted to wear face masks.
"There is a relief that an end could be in sight. We've been operating with bubbles of staff to try and keep staff separate from each other because of isolation periods. So basically if for example one of our front-of-house team members were to become infected, it would take out our entire front-of-house team.
"We've brought in staff bubbles in the sense that if we lose one team, we still have another team to come in but what that has done is left us short staffed so not only have we had to face not being able to operate at full capacity, we've also been short staffed and that's affected how many customers we can have in as well".