Questions for Rishi Sunak and the Covid Enquiry

Module 2 and the treasury.

Module 2 has been dealing with Core UK decision-making and political governance and so far has been far reaching with inputs from scientists, advisors and politicians including the ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Tomorrow, its the turn of the treasury and our ex-Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

Eat out to help out

I really hope this will pay attention to the “Eat out to help out” scheme. Despite saying repeatedly during the peak of the pandemic that the government followed the science, what has emerged since, is that this was not strictly true in many instances. Indeed, evidence has emerged of no science input in the Eat out to Help out scheme.

This was a scheme devised by the then chancellor Mr Sunak to boost the hospitality sector in the post-lockdown summer of 2020. Diners were offered a discount in cafes and restaurants. However, we had barely come out of lockdown and this scheme, in Sir Patrick Vallance’s words “completely reversed” all scientific advice and worse, likely drove cases up more rapidly. Some research suggested new COVID-19 infections were driven up between 8 and 17%. Restaurants that took part saw an increase in visits of between 10 and 200% compared to 2019. Areas with the biggest take up of the offer, experienced a sharp increase in new COVID-19 infection clusters a week after the scheme began. The initiative was costly -around £500 million- but any economic benefits were short-lived as visits to restaurants quickly declined. Question should be asked tomorrow regarding such decision making.

The Eat out to help out scheme is not the only treasury decision that merits closer scrutiny in the enquiry. Indeed Patrick Vallance stated that some economic predictions were based on "no evidence, no transparency, pure dogma and wrong throughout".

Test and Trace Scheme

Close attention should be paid to the lack of support for those isolating. For a Test and trace scheme to work it requires proper support for those who need to isolate. The payments offered to incentivise people to isolate were far too small and were available to too few people. It was estimated that the £500 self-isolation only covered a quarter of the average worker’s earnings. Support payments were only available to about 1 out of every 8 workers and 2 million of the lowest paid workers were missed out entirely. Some of these workers may have included frontline workers in hospitals and elderly care homes. If you consider that contract staff may work between multiple elderly care homes you can imagine how dreadful it was that so many have been so poorly supported financially perhaps necessitating them to work and spread the infection. Another example for the lack of thought for disadvantaged families was the debacle over lack of provision of food vouchers for children. We know that inequalities had a huge impact on covid outcomes, yet repeatedly it was not given enough priority and indeed inequalities have widened subsequently.

I hope, these issues will be dealt with tomorrow but I fear with thousands of messages from Sunak’s phone “missing” that tomorrow may be a frustrating and infuriating day for those waiting for answers. Nonetheless, hopefully lessons can still be learnt about the need for diversity in decision making and inequalities to be considered as a priority.