Over the last week the Evening Standard has been proving, day after day, just what an essential service it provides for London. Alongside the standard.co.uk our newspaper has consistently delivered leading coverage of the unfolding Covid-19 crisis.

In common with almost our entire office, so many Londoners have found themselves WFH and as a result the streets, particularly in the centre of town, have been much quieter than normal. And we expect this trend to increase, as the outbreak continues and transport services reduce further.

But it has been heartening to see how well our daily distribution figure has held up, achieving a four-day average of 642,000 copies per day in challenging circumstances. It has also been notable how our pick up in suburban supermarkets such as Waitrose and Sainsbury’s has also increased. It seems the Standard is an essential supply alongside a pack of paracetamol.

Given the changed dynamics of where our readers now are, we have been working hard on a unique new service for Londoners which will allow the Standard to still reach the commuters who normally would have been picking up their copies in Zone One but who are now working from home.

As well as up-weighting the volumes of copies into essential retailers, we will be launching a unique new Home Delivery Service this Monday. For the first time in its history the Evening Standard be distributed directly to people’s houses in 26 neighbourhoods in Zone Two and Three. From Hampstead to Bethnal Green, Brixton to Hammersmith, Swiss Cottage to Greenwich, our vans and delivery teams will home deliver hundreds of thousands of copies every single day.

This will mean we will temporarily reduce the number of distributors at central travel points in anticipation of further restrictions. It also allows us to take hundreds of merchandising staff from the streets where they are face to face with customers and re-deploy them into a Home Delivery network which reduces contact.

In total we will be targeting 500,000 copies per day which we believe is an appropriate scale in the circumstances and is still considerably larger than anything else serving London’s readers. In the context of currently lower advertising volumes, it makes good economic sense too.

I’d like to thank our distributions and logistics teams in particular for their exceptional work in making this innovative new Home Delivery Service a reality – and in record time too. Bravo!

Mike Soutar, Evening Standard Chief Executive.