Covid-19: Economic Costs

Lord Trimble Excerpts

Tuesday 28th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn]

My Lords, I will not anticipate the spending review at this stage, but I can reassure noble Lords that analysis done of action taken by the Government until the end of May has shown that those interventions, alongside the existing tax and welfare system, have helped to reduce the loss of income of working households by up to two-thirds. The poorest households have received the most support as a proportion of their income. These measures have included, as noble Lords will know, the increase in the standard allowance of universal credit by £1,400 a year on top of existing uprating measures.

[Lord Trimble (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for having the paper circulated to us. I briefly refer to the last paragraph, which talks about measures targeted specifically at groups most at risk but goes on to say:

“Such a policy should probably have been started before the end of June”.


I fear that the authors are not being realistic about the date for the targets and have not taken account of the difficulties for Ministers who wish to make a change but find that making changes is extremely difficult under our processes. I recall that, when Matt Hancock talked about increasing the targets for testing, he was met with derision. I hope that that will not happen here.

[Baroness Penn]

My Lords, I agree that the Government are in a different position in their response to the target now than they were at the start of the outbreak. We now know a lot more about the virus and we have developed in our research institutions the first effective therapeutic response to it. The test and trace system has been going for around seven weeks and has shown an increase in its efficacy week on week. We want to build on that so that we can have a more targeted and localised response to any future outbreaks.