Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

As we are all only too aware, neither the health crisis nor the economic crisis is over, and we are going into the winter. In both respects, the furlough scheme has a role to play to protect workers until our economic recovery is truly under way. I would like to thank the public servants who have administered the job retention schemes. In many cases, we have had much contact with them, and they have done an excellent job. Of course, as we have already heard, Germany and France have recognised this and taken the considered decision to extend their equivalent furlough schemes.

Let us consider the unequal fiscal settlement between Westminster and the devolved nations. While the main levers of our response, such as health, are devolved in Wales, Westminster doggedly refuses to cede further economic powers to the Welsh Government to underpin these health interventions. Even as the UK Government borrow their way out of the immediate crisis, Westminster continues to enforce an artificial cap on the Welsh Government’s borrowing ability. It is one rule for Westminster and another for the devolved nations.

Of course, this has an effect. Welsh Government-mandated local lockdowns without furlough support could mean families being forced to choose between putting food on the table and statutory sick pay of less than £100 a week. This is an unfair and an unworkable choice, and it highlights the real consequences of Westminster ending furlough too early for Wales. During the good times, refusing to allow Wales the financial means to help ourselves might be interpreted as dog in the manger behaviour, but in these hard times, it is wilfully obstructionist.

Our response is interconnected, but the UK Government intervene in unforeseen and possibly unforeseeable ways. For example, outdoor centres such as the Urdd in Glan-llyn near Bala in my constituency—but across north Wales and, I am sure, across England as well—are struggling as the Department for Education in England continues to forbid such school-based activities, yet the UK Government, rightly in my opinion, insist that schools should reopen and office workers go back to their offices. The workers at these outdoor centres are caught as the collateral between different policies, and where do they stand? They look to lose their livelihoods.

We believe that furlough must continue, specifically for severely affected sectors such as tourism, leisure, hospitality and the arts, which have lost a key proportion of their earnings season and are now heading into a bleak winter. Some of them tell me they have lost two thirds of their earnings season. The important message, if I could leave this with the House, is that these are not zombie businesses. Their business model was viable and they were flourishing before covid, and they only need to be conveyed safely through the winter season to have a viable and flourishing future. Anything else would be an abdication of responsibility by this Government and would risk undoing the collective sacrifice of the past several months across all four nations of the United Kingdom.