Boris Johnson told MPs England's new Covid tier system has an expiry date of February 3, as he attempts to ward off a Tory rebellion.

The Prime Minister has angered some of his party with a plan to impose stringent restrictions across much of England when the national lockdown ends on Wednesday, and could struggle to get the measures through Parliament on Tuesday.

In a letter to colleagues ahead of a Commons vote on the restrictions on Tuesday, Mr Johnson insisted the tiered measures for local areas will be reviewed every fortnight, and that legislation will have a "sunset of February 3", with MPs offered the chance to vote to extend them.

The letter reads: "Regulations have a sunset of 3 February.

"After the fourth fortnightly review (27 January), parliament will have another vote on the tiered approach, determining whether the measures stay in place until the end of March."

The Government will review local areas' tiers every fortnight and bring the regulations before Parliament after the fourth review on January 27 which will determine whether the tier system stays in place until the end of March.

News Shopper:

Mr Johnson also said the first such review, on December 16, would consider the views of local directors of public health, with a final decision on whether any areas should change tiers made at a Cabinet committee. The changes would come into effect on December 19.

In a further olive branch to MPs, the Prime Minister committed to publish more data and outline what circumstances need to change for an area to move down a tier, as well analysis of the health, economic and social impacts of the measures taken to suppress coronavirus.

Only the Isle of Wight, Cornwall, and the Isles of Scilly will be under the lightest Tier 1 controls, while large swathes of the Midlands, North East and North West are in the most restrictive Tier 3.

In total, 99% of England will enter Tier 2 or 3, with tight restrictions on bars and restaurants and a ban on households mixing indoors when the four-week national lockdown lifts on Wednesday.

Several senior Tories have expressed opposition to the plan, including the 1922 Committee chairman Sir Graham Brady who said he wanted to see people "treated as adults" and trusted with their own health decisions.

Mr Johnson acknowledged on Friday that people felt "frustrated", particularly in areas with low infection rates which now face tighter restrictions than before the lockdown.

He said: "The difficulty is that if you did it any other way, first of all you'd divide the country up into loads and loads of very complicated sub-divisions - there has got to be some simplicity and clarity in the way we do this.

"The second problem is that, alas, our experience is that, when a high incidence area is quite close to a low incidence area, unless you beat the problem in the high incidence area, the low incidence area, I'm afraid, starts to catch up."