Covid-19: Government Support

Peter Grant Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mr Mundell. I am pleased to sum up for the Scottish National party this evening. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) for securing the debate, and, as others have mentioned, for his tenacity in refusing to let the excluded become the forgotten. I commend everyone else who has contributed.

I summed up in a Petitions Committee debate on the same subject in December 2020. Most of what has been said today was said in December 2020. It was ignored then. It cannot continue to be ignored. What did not happen in December 2020 did not happen today either. Nobody has made a fulsome defence of the Government’s action, or inaction. In 2020, eight Conservative MPs spoke. None of them defended the Government. In 2020, we got platitudes and fake sympathy from the Minister who responded. I hope that that is one thing that will not be repeated here tonight.

There is a saying much loved by a certain type of business analyst, which is, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” That is exactly what the Government did in the 10 years between knowing that a serious potentially lethal viral pandemic was coming and it actually appearing. They planned for the public health implications. There was no planning at all as to what they would do in the almost inevitable situation where significant sections of the economy would have to be shut down to protect public health from the ravages of the virus.

It is safe to say that when the Prime Minister made his famous, or infamous, “Don’t go to the pub” speech, neither he nor the rest of the Government had any idea what they were going to do to protect those in the hospitality sector from the immediate and inevitable collapse of their businesses, or indeed, to help anybody else in any other sector. An indication of how hasty and ill-thought-out the Government’s response was is that one of the mainstays of that support, announced on 11 March 2020 —the business interruption loan scheme—had to be completely rewritten 23 days later.

It would be tempting to assume that that same chaotic, shambolic approach is the reason that so many self-employed people and small business owners got overlooked, but that would be wrong because it was not a mistake. It was not an oversight. It was not an accident. It was absolutely deliberate.

The Chancellor told the House in his 11 March Budget statement last year:

“There are millions of people working hard who are self-employed or in the gig economy. They will need our help too.”—[Official Report, 11 March 2020; Vol. 673, c. 280.]

He knew—the Government knew—that those people did not fit into the packages of support that had already been identified, but he went on to announce that the help they were getting was being allowed to apply for universal credit—a benefit that has been deliberately designed to be not enough to live on for any sustained period.

Let us look at one group of excluded workers: people who were persuaded in the past, by previous Governments, to set up their self-employed business as a limited company with themselves as the only shareholder and themselves as the only director, or perhaps with a close family member as another director. When the Government claimed in May 2020 that they had not had time to work out proper eligibility criteria to apply to that massive group of workers, that was tenuous, two months into the pandemic. It is beyond ludicrous to continue—to keep saying that 16 months in—but that is exactly the excuse the Government are using. The other excuse is that it is too hard to tell the difference between a shareholder of a company who actively works in the company and a shareholder whose only involvement is to take the dividends at the end of the year.

This is not difficult; it is not rocket science. It is easy. If only Governments and Government agencies were as willing to use data-matching technology to help people through a crisis as they are, quite rightly, to use it to catch benefit fraudsters and other crooks fleecing the finances of the public sector. That is all it needs; it needs only the will. If the Minister, as I expect, is going to defend the Government’s inaction, all I ask of him is that he do the excluded the courtesy of admitting to them that the reason the Government are doing nothing is that the Government do not care.

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

I call the shadow Minister. Again, if you could stick to four minutes, that would be extremely helpful.