A multi-million pound support package has been announced for the UK’s transport links.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said there were “tentative signs” that progress is being made in the battle against coronavirus as he announced a support package to ensure supply routes bringing critical goods into the UK remain open.

Speaking at the Downing Street press conference on Friday, April 24, Mr Shapps said: “The continued operation of both passenger and freight transport is critically important to our resilience as a country.

“So today I am announcing a new package of measures to ensure transport boosts our national response to Covid-19.”

Mr Shapps paid tribute to the work of transport workers who have gone “above and beyond to keep vital freight and passenger services running”.

He added: “The actions I have announced today will ensure that transport can continue to serve the nation during this crisis, keep us supplied with everything we need to stay at home, yet also ensure that infrastructure required to emerge from this pandemic stands ready to serve us all when that time does arise.”

Mr Shapps also revealed the government had given the green light for drones to be trialled as a way of delivering medical supplies on the Isle of Wight and that funding had been made available for tram and light railway networks across England.

The Transport Secretary also urged people to stay home over what is expected to be another warm and sunny weekend.

He said: “The country has done incredibly well in adhering to social distancing and there is a danger as we go into yet another warm sunny weekend that people think that perhaps these graphs are showing that the peak is over.”

Mr Shapps added: “It isn’t over, we’re riding perhaps, we hope, a downward trend but it is by no means, no means established yet.

“When people ask me when will the measures, the social distancing, the stay at home measures, be altered, my answer in some ways is that some of this lies in your own hands.

“The more we adhere to it and are strict about the social distancing that is required, the faster that decision will be able to be made.

“But that decision will, of course, be made entirely on the advice of science and medical advice.”