Covid-19

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD) [V]]

My constituency has the highest proportion of its workforce on furlough of any constituency in the entire United Kingdom. There has been a sixfold increase in unemployment, and it is obvious why. It is because hospitality and tourism is comfortably our biggest employer. We have the Lake district, the Yorkshire dales and vast swathes of Cumbria so beautiful that they could not find a national park to put them in. For the people working in those sectors, the reality is that many businesses have gone to the wall already. Many, many more have survived, and they have done so because of the support that they have received. That was a wise decision that the Government took 10 months or so ago as we entered the first lockdown.

I encourage the Government not to throw away that investment now by penny-pinching towards the end of this pandemic crisis. The simple reality is that, yes, furlough is of vast importance for so many businesses to be able to keep their heads above water, but perhaps a quarter to a third or even more of their outgoings is nothing to do with staff; it is other overheads that they simply have no income or savings left to fund. Those are the businesses that are going to the wall by the week now in Cumbria and other tourist hotspots around the country.

I urge the Government to do four things: first, to extend the business rates holiday; secondly, to extend the VAT cut; thirdly, to extend furlough and to say they are going to do it right now, not delaying it until the Budget next week, because that confidence is what businesses lack, and that is what is pushing so many of them to the wall; and fourthly and finally, a specific grant package to deal with the simple fact that without any income or any savings now many businesses, though they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, might not make it to the end of the tunnel.

I must also make a further plea. After 11 months, what is preventing the Chancellor of the Exchequer from investing something to support the 4,000 people in my constituency—and perhaps 3 million people around the country—who have been excluded from any kind of support whatever, and who now face destitution as they seek to pay the rent or the mortgage and to feed their kids? I am talking about those people who are self-employed, but have been so for less than two years, those who are directors of small limited companies, taxi drivers, hairdressers, personal trainers and the like. Why will the Government not support the excluded? It is not too late for them to do so.

Let me make a final, very local point. As we pay tribute to all those people doing everything they can to serve our communities at times like this, I think about people working in social care and public health as well as the wider NHS, people working in schools, and people dealing with those who face housing need or who are looked after by our local authorities. Today Cumbria’s local government has announced a plunge into a top-down restructuring; what a witless waste of everybody’s time.