Newspaper reports circulated last week that the government had made plans for a national lockdown or firebreak around the October half-term school holiday, if the number of hospitalisations continue at the current level.

This has been denied by the Department for Education.

However, the prime minister’s spokesman told the BBC “these kind of measures would only be reintroduced as a last resort to prevent unsustainable pressure on our NHS”.

Public Health England recorded another 30,825 coronavirus cases yesterday (13 September), a fall of 8.4% over the last seven days. There were 61 deaths, a 25.1% rise over the last seven days, with 1,076 people admitted to hospital, a 4.7% rise over the same period.

During the first full lockdown, which began last March, many regulated businesses were unable to carry out their regulatory obligations, such as ID checks and manual methods of verification – as this involved hard copy documents and face-to-face meetings, says SmartSearch.

SmartSearch chief executive John Dobson, says there are still “a significant number of firms” relying on processes that may not be covid-safe that would be at risk in another lockdown.

Dobson adds: “We all hope that the country is not plunged back into lockdown this winter, but if there is a possibility of it happening, business owners should be asking whether they are ready for it to avoid disruption to security and anti-money laundering processes.

“We carried out research among 500 regulated businesses in the UK this summer, which found more than a third, or 34%, across the financial services, legal and property sectors, still make manual checks when onboarding new customers.

“That is a significant number of firms that would be at risk in the event of a lockdown, not only in terms of business disruption, but opening up gaps in security that can be exploited by organised crime and fraudsters.

“But by making the switch to electronic verification, which has been endorsed by the UK government, all anti-money laundering compliance can be done working from home, and outcomes shared with authorised colleagues wherever they are in the country.

“Another key benefit for remote working is that all the input and outcome data can be hosted centrally for a ‘watching brief’ oversight by the compliance senior management. This also ensures perpetual Know Your Customer checks as the system updates automatically once the data is inputted.

“It is an uncertain time especially going into winter, but it’s not too late to get that protection in place to give businesses confidence in the event of another lockdown.”