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Trade figures have issued new social distancing guidelines for shops to prepare for any easing of the lockdown. The British Retail Consortium and Usdaw's advice includes providing hand sanitiser for customers. Helen Dickinson, the BRC's boss, said: "The safety and wellbeing of retail colleagues and customers remains the highest priority." Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Sunday that "careful steps" will be needed when easing the lockdown. The industry body and the union issued the advice to non-food retailers, closely based on what is already happening in many food stores. Some suggestions include: limiting the number of people in-store at any one time encouraging customers to shop alone where possible scheduling deliveries to avoid crowding cleaning door handles, lift buttons and hand rails regularly using floor markings to remind customers to maintain a distance of 2m Shops that were deemed "non-essential" have been shut since the government set out strict new measures to tackle the spread of coronavirus on 23 March. Those allowed to trade under lockdown include supermarkets, pharmacies, newsagents and post offices. Usdaw general secretary Paddy Lillis said that "Non-food retail should only start trading again when expert public health advice agrees. "However, we need to be ready and we need to make sure that the proper preparations and measures are put in place." Five firms booming despite the lockdown Lockdown should ease to help economy, says Philip Hammond Companies that had temporarily shut stores are starting to reopen amid lockdown measures, after introducing new social distancing controls. DIY chain Homebase reopened 20 of its UK stores for a trial period on Saturday, following the lead of its competitor B&Q. Hardware shops were included on the government's list of essential retailers that were allowed to trade under the restrictions and Homebase customers could continue to shop online. The boss of UK shoe repair firm Timpson, James Timpson, said on social media that it will reopen 40 of its outlets based in supermarkets, which are classified as essential retailers, next week.

It’s often said there’s nothing new under the sun, and that’s as true in the automotive world as anywhere else. We’re constantly being dazzled with the latest tech, but it only takes a quick flick through the history books to discover that much of what’s ‘new’ has actually been seen before – often decades ago. Here we look at 10 relatively recent innovations and find out just how fresh they really are. Plus we note five engineering inventions that promised to transform the way we drive, before pretty much disappearing without a trace. So dig in for a little motoring déjà vu. The Toyota Prius was arguably the car that kick-started this revolution in 1997, although Alfa Romeo and Audi were experimenting with hybrids in the 1980s. Yet this system is almost as old as the car itself, with the Ferdinand Porsche-designed Lohner-Porsche Mixte making its debut in 1900. Drive was by a pair of hub-mounted electric motors, which were powered by batteries charged by two De Dion-Bouton petrol engines. The arrival of the Ford Model T made this heavy and expensive propulsion system redundant for nearly a century. A climate-controlled cabin is still a fairly novel experience for many UK motorists, but the US was a much earlier adopter, with chilled interiors standard on most cars by the early 1970s. For the first true air-conditioned car, you have to go back to 1940, when Packard offered the Babcock and Bishop Weather-Conditioner. It worked, but an astronomical price and cooling gubbins that took up most of the boot meant it proved unpo[CENSORED]r, paving the way for the more powerful and compact Chrysler Airtemp system of 1953. Ever since the smartphone revolution, car manufacturers have been in a mad rush to fill dashboards with similarly slick touchscreen interfaces. Yet this high-tech automotive must-have accessory predates the Apple iPhone by about two decades, making its debut on the 1986 Buick Riviera. Called the Graphic Control Center, the 9in display featured green-on-black graphics and controlled almost every on-board function, including the radio and climate control. Ahead of its time it may have been, but buyers weren’t convinced, and it was consigned to the bin by 1990. The quick-shifting dual-clutch transmission has been around for nearly two decades now, following its debut on the Volkswagen Golf R32 in 2003. Yet work on this novel system started much earlier than that. French engineer Adolphe Kégresse went so far as to patent his design in 1935, despite never building a working version, but it was Porsche that refined it into what we have today. It had been working on the idea since 1964, but it wasn’t until 1983 that it installed an experimental unit in its 1983 Group C 956 racer, while Audi trialled the same transmission in its 1985 Group B S1 quattro rally car.