Rishi Sunak ‘refused to pay people more to self-isolate during Covid'
Rishi Sunak refused to pay people more to self-isolate during the pandemic, the inquiry into the crisis has heard.
Baroness Harding, the former head of NHS Test and Trace, said the then-chancellor rejected proposals to pay people more to isolate 'at every opportunity' while he was chancellor.
'There was an intransigence to that, that I think was very sad,' she told the Covid Inquiry.
In September 2020, the government announced that people would be required to self-isolate by law.
A £500 package of support was put in place for people on low incomes who could not work from home and would lose pay as a result.
But in her witness statement to the inquiry, Baroness Harding said: 'The UK spent proportionally much less than other developed countries enabling disadvantaged people to self-isolate.
'If we had allocated more of the NHS Test and Trace budget to isolation support, I strongly suspect that fewer would have died and infection rates would have been lower, with all the benefits that would have brought.'
Asked whether she felt she held any responsibility for the way the Test and Trace budget unfolded, she replied: 'It's certainly the thing that I wish I had succeeded in persuading ministers to do.
'We had the money in the budget, we didn't spend all of our budget, and I also think that spending more on self-isolation would have reduced the need for testing.
'But I wasn't the decision-maker – the decision-maker in this was the chancellor and at every opportunity, from June onwards, the chancellor rejected the proposals. And, in the end, that was not in my control.'
Summarising her written evidence, Sophie Cartwright KC, the counsel to the inquiry, told the hearing that, amid low take-up of self-isolation when the support system came into place in September 2020, the Baroness 'continued to champion for more to be done' but felt on occasion like she was 'banging her head against a brick wall'.
Baroness Harding said: 'The modelling showed that the best way to get an operationally effective test and trace system that would reduce the rate of infection and enable us to get back to a more normal life was to encourage more people to come forward for testing.
'And that the data told us that people weren't coming forward for testing because they were scared of the consequences of isolation. To be honest, it was intensely frustrating.
'And what you see through the paper trail – I found it quite distressing reading it, to be honest – because we did try really hard to persuade ministers that this would be a good thing, not just for the individual wellbeing of those disadvantaged people, but also economically – this was one of the ways you could have had less economic harm for the country as a whole.
'And I think that the chancellor, particularly, this was a point of principle for him.
'I don't think there was any amount of data and analysis that I could have put that would have changed his mind – it was a point of principle that he didn't want to create an additional welfare benefit.
'Now I do appreciate this is a complex thing... there is a policy conundrum there, but what I was unable to achieve was any substantive engagement in how to mitigate that policy problem and to recognise that actually, the policy problem of not supporting the vulnerable to isolate was a much bigger one.
'You can hear my frustration as I say it now, there was an intransigence to that that I think was very sad.'
Meanwhile, Baroness Harding was asked about Test and Trace needing to put all communications out through Downing Street.
She said that, in a future pandemic, a public health agency should be able to have deep expertise 'but also permission to speak', adding: 'Trust in a system like this is its most important quality and I would be first to say that we could have done better at building society's trust in this.'
Ms Cartwright replied: 'I think you detailed that request for you to essentially directly communicate on those issues was refused, and essentially, you ended up feeling like NHS Test and Trace became the whipping boy.' Baroness Harding replied: 'Yes.'
The inquiry continues.
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