‘Taxpayer woes’ to increase due to government Covid-support failures
The government continues to take a bruising over its handling of the Covid crisis, after a recent PAC report highlighted a host of errors in its pandemic support scheme.
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"whether the department acts on them (a series of recommendations) will remain to be seen" is indeed the key issue ... but it's unfair to pick on BEIS and lay all the blame at its door.
It was only created as a Ministry 3 years before the pandemic struck - and was obviously not the inventor of the various 'support schemes' unveiled at great speed (and without sufficient forethought).
All power to Meg Hillier's elbow ... but she's careful to lay the blame at the feet of Government, not one of the ministries lumbered with ill-conceived decisions.
With such a large amount of fraud involved, perhaps this is really a matter of the what people have done rather than what the Government have done.
These really shouldn't be referred to as 'Covid support measures'.
They were lockdown support measures.
As Sweden showed, and as the outcomes from lockdown severity which varied widely around the world also seems to show, whilst the economic and social impact of the lockdowns is obvious, the benefits are not.
A lockdown may have been justified on the precautionary principle in March 2020, but nowhere was the proportionality principle applied. We could reduce deaths from road traffic accidents to nil in the UK if we banned all transport by road. We don't, for obvious reasons.
In 2011 (probably at great expense) the government prepared a 'flu pandemic preparedness' report which anticipated as many as 300,000 deaths in a 4 month period from a virulent new flu strain. Lockdowns, face masks, school closures and border closures were all rejected in that report as unlikely to be effective and, at best, acting as a delay not a solution. The report suggested such measures would cause more economic/social damage than health benefit.
Sure, look into how measures which were put in place were handled. But the far more important question is whether they should have been implemented in the first place.
There were three major pandemics in the 20th century 'Spanish' flu, 'Hong Kong' flu and 'Asian' flu.
There will be further pandemics this century. Let's just hope we learn the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic.