RISHI SUNAK will come under pressure on Friday to explain why he ignored expert warnings during the pandemic, after the Covid inquiry heard politics drove government’s public messaging about the virus.
TUC assistant general secretary Kate Bell is giving evidence to the hearing this morning and has said the Prime Minister has “serious questions to answer” after the Treasury “massively undermined” Britain’s public health effort.
“It pushed up infection rates, put a huge strain on our public services and ballooned the cost of Test and Trace,” she said.
“The Prime Minister must come clean about why these decisions were taken, especially when senior government advisers were warning that people couldn’t afford to stay home when sick.
“And he must explain why he saw fit to spend more on Eat Out to Help Out than on helping people to self-isolate.
“The failure to provide proper financial support was an act of self-sabotage that left millions brutally exposed to the pandemic.”
This week the inquiry heard that Mr Sunak blocked chief medical officer Chris Whitty’s calls in May of 2020 for “an accessible offer of financial support” to help reduce the risk of “no adherence” to Covid rules.
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The TUC will urge Mr Sunak on Friday to answer why he didn’t provide better statutory sick pay (SSP) than just £94 a week, which left the average worker facing a £418 drop in earnings if they had to self-isolate.
The government had been warned at the start of the pandemic that two million workers had no sick pay protection at all, it added, noting that 23 per cent of the country’s workforce had to rely on SSP if they needed to self-isolate during the pandemic, rising to three in 10 for the lowest paid.
Meanwhile freedom of information requests showed the then-chancellor spent more than £800 million on Eat Out to Help Out than the £385m on funding the self-isolation scheme.
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