Ex-Olympian gym boss spending £20,000 a month furloughing staff slams Boris Johnson

A gym owner who is spending £20,000 a month furloughing her staff today slammed Boris Johnson for opening pubs before fitness centres. 

Former Olympic speed skater Sarah Lindsay owns Roar Fitness transformation gyms which have branches across London. 

Appearing on Good Morning Britain today, she revealed it was costing her some £20,000 a month to furlough staff while paying tens of thousands of pounds in rent despite being closed for nearly a year.

The businesswoman, who counts celebrities including Vogue Williams and Piers Morgan among her clients, hit out at the government for failing to do enough to help small businesses during the pandemic.

She added: ‘I just don’t understand why health and fitness and wellness isn’t prioritised more – you’re going to be able to – and this is going to be a very unpopular opinion I’m sure – but you’re going to be able to go to a pub garden and have a pint before you can focus on your health.’

Gyms, shops, hairdressers and pubs must remain closed until April 12 at the earliest – regardless of mounting fears about the economic meltdown. 

Sarah runs Roar Fitness, which specialises in nutrition, weight-focused exercises and complete body transformations in as little as eight weeks. Throughout the lockdown she has been running weekly live workouts on her Instagram. 

Today she joined the chorus of gym owners who’ve slammed the government for not opening gyms sooner. 

She told GMB: ‘I represent a lot of small businesses. There’s just a bit of a gap, I think, where certain things are priorities, some things aren’t and we’re just left hanging. 

‘I just think that that should be pushed a bit harder really rather than held back.’

Asked what she wants to hear from Chancellor Rishi Sunak next week, she added: ‘We need to be looked after. We have all these expenses going out and no income going in.

‘The biggest expenses are rent so that has to be looked at but at the moment it’s just between us and our landlords so if they’re not able to help you or don’t want to help you then you’re still responsible for paying it and although they can’t evict you while were still locked down, they can the day you open.

‘If you don’t pay your arrears then you’re breaking the terms of your lease. So there’s no point in not paying it, so you do still have to pay. 

‘Everybody’s got a loan so people have had to borrow lots of money and yes, that might be interest free, but I don’t want debt.

‘I don’t want to accumulate debt – I wasn’t in debt before. 

‘I’m hoping that they extend this interest free period because lots of people borrowed a year ago and we’ve been closed a year, so what’s going to happen then?’

The businesswoman’s call to action comes amid growing Tory and business disquiet about the ultra-cautious approach being taken by Boris Johnson, even though the vaccination drive has been surging ahead.

Schools will return on March 8, but there will be almost no further loosening of the draconian curbs before Easter. There will be a five week gap between each of the four main stages of the plan, with scientists having won the argument in government that time is needed to assess the impact.

The PM has been boosted by snap polls showing the public largely backs his stance, with 46 per cent telling YouGov it is about right – and around a fifth suggesting it is too fast.

Prof Ferguson – whose grim modelling triggered the initial lockdown last year – sounded a bright note on Times Radio last night.

‘Hopefully what we’ll see when each step happens is a very limited resurgence of infections. In which case, there’s a chance we can accelerate the schedule,’ he said.

However, Mr Hancock dismissed the idea of speeding the schedule up in a round of interviews this morning. ‘No. We need to see the effects of each step, and that takes five weeks,’ he said.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Covid Recovery Group of lockdown-sceptic Tories has claimed the Government’s roadmap is based on ‘dodgy assumptions’. 

Former chief whip Mark Harper told LBC that delays to lifting restrictions were due to the Government ‘understating’ the performance of the vaccine.

The Forest of Dean MP said: ‘The biggest flaw is they assume a very low uptake of the vaccine.

‘We know the uptake of the vaccine is over 90 per cent in the top groups that have been vaccinated, above 95 per cent, they’ve assumed 15 per cent of the population don’t take the vaccine.

‘I have two problems with that, one is that isn’t realistic, that’s not what’s happening, but secondly there is a real question about whether the rest of the country should be held back for two months because some people choose not to take the vaccine.’

He added: ‘The Government seems to have looked at some models with dodgy assumptions and have effectively delayed opening the country by two months.’

Announcing his plan last night, Mr Johnson insisted he was putting Britain on a ‘one way road to freedom’ that would put the nation in an ‘incomparably better’ position.

Progress along the roadmap will depend on meeting four tests: the success of the vaccine rollout, evidence of vaccine efficacy, an assessment of new variants, and keeping infection rates below a level that could put ‘unsustainable’ pressure on the NHS.

The Prime Minister denied he was being overly cautious, saying the reopening would happen ‘as fast as we reasonably can’ and the ‘end really is in sight’.

Insisting that the unlocking would be led by ‘data not dates’, he added: ‘I won’t be buccaneering with people’s lives.’ But he acknowledged there was no guarantee a fourth lockdown would not be needed if the virus took an unexpected turn. 

It has emerged that Sage scientific advisers had warned heavily against an accelerated timetable, saying it would lead to many more infections.

They said a further 90,000 deaths could result in a worst-case scenario. They modelled the effects of allowing solo indoor visitors as early as March 29 but found it would increase hospital admissions significantly.

Under an initial scenario, Mr Johnson had planned to reopen outdoor pubs and restaurants, outdoor attractions and non-essential shops in time for the Easter Bank Holiday weekend – but this was delayed until April 12 following criticism by Government scientists.

Papers released last night showed that the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned No10 there would be at least another 30,000 coronavirus deaths in even the ‘most optimistic’ case – and possibly 91,000 caused by a dramatic spike in cases following a rapid easing of lockdown in April.

Presenting their modelling of a series of different roadmaps out of lockdown, the scientists claimed that without a gradual approach, the pressure on NHS hospitals would peak in June at nearly 60,000 coronavirus inpatients – higher than even last month’s peak of 39,000 patients.

The SAGE papers also showed that the timetable, which also would have brought the full reopening of hospitality in either April or May, could have led to 55,000 further deaths and the R rate rising by as much as 0.5.

Scientists were again urging caution today as the government fended off criticism.

Dr Mike Tildesley, reader in mathematical modelling of infectious diseases at the University of Warwick and a member of the Government advisory group SPI-M, said the ‘one-way route to freedom’ promised by the PM was ‘potentially a little bit uncertain’.

When asked whether the dates for lifting restrictions may change, he told the Today programme: ‘In terms of the future dates, I think we always need to be aware that the Government needs to be reactive – if we do see a spike in cases or if we see things not going down as fast as we hoped, I think there needs to remain the possibility to hold off for a couple of weeks so we get things in control.

‘Particularly if the Government wants to have this one-way route to freedom, which I think in itself is potentially a little bit uncertain.

‘It may be that we have to have some measures introduced for a little bit of time in order to prevent these surges of infection occurring so that ultimately we can take virtually a one-way route back to normality.’

Dr Tildesley said that he was ‘concerned’ that the virus might persist particular parts of the country.

Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme whether Covid-19 could remain a ‘disease of the deprived’, he said: ‘This is a real concern actually for me and I know a number of other scientists have raised this, that we may end up in a situation where we have the ‘vaccine rich’ and as it were, who are able to access the vaccine who have taken up the vaccine and are at much lower risk.

‘And the maybe people in society who have not taken up the vaccine and potentially these individuals could be clustered in particular parts of the country, and there is increased risk there.

‘So I think it’s something that we do need to do more about to make sure that the vaccine is available to everyone to take up and so that we minimise the risk of the virus persisting in particular parts of the country, and causing much more harm to those communities.’