Yahoo Finance Government neglect of those in need has deepened the UK's Covid crisis
When the great reckoning is made as to why Britain did so badly in Covid-19 infections and deaths, the grand inquisitors will point to the threadbare NHS and public services, to crippled councils and civil service capacity. But inequality will bear much of the blame: the infection spread more easily among the people least able to protect themselves – and until everyone is protected, no one is.
That’s the price we pay for the political choices this country has made time and again. The same rightwing Tory MPs who are outraged at lockdowns have spent decades deliberately impoverishing people by blocking higher pay, fairer chances, good social housing and decent social security. Longer lockdowns may be a payback for social neglect.
Monday’s ONS report shone a light yet again on how many of the low-paid die compared with professional classes. We have too many people struggling to get by, a society bottom-heavy with cadres of the low-paid and badly housed working for employers who fail to protect them. The ONS stats show death rates among men in “elementary” jobs that are many times higher than among professionals. Lack of care by employers means the lowest paid have little control over their working lives and conditions. Failure to curb the spread of the virus may be due less to occasional lockdown-flouting raves than to people who can’t self-isolate, with roughly four out of five with symptoms not coming forward to be tested. Only a quarter who are notified self-isolate for 10 days. Many have no choice, with employers demanding that they work. But while individuals get instant fines, not one company has been charged with a Covid-related breach.
A fraction of the eye-popping £22bn spent on failing to test and trace would pay people to stay home. Only one in eight workers qualify for the £500 that can be given to some isolators forced to miss work.
When the final death toll from Covid is known, Britain’s disproportionate number of people living on the edge of poverty needs to be treated as a cause: more equal societies are happier and healthier. In a prosperous country, the long tail of deprivation shames us in international health and education league tables.
The chancellor’s plan to cut the £20 he had added temporarily to universal credit shines a particularly bright light on the great social divide. What’s £20 worth to whom? It’s the price of a London taxi ride an MP and a journalist might take to a lunch costing three times as much. It’s a trifle to the professional and managerial classes. But try spending that £20 on a week’s groceries and it doesn’t go far enough to keep a family out of a food bank. (No emails, please, from the why-don’t-they-eat-lentils-and-porridge brigade).
But with that cut, a minute sum to the chancellor personally, £6bn to his exchequer, the number of children estimated to fall into poverty would increase to 34% – from an already disgracefully high level of 30% – by 2024. As millions more fall into unemployment this year and next, Britain’s basic benefit rate is at its lowest in real terms since 1990-91, says the Resolution Foundation. Praise has been heaped on Sunak’s generosity, but here’s the shocking fact revealed by Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation this week: due to benefits parsimony, the bottom fifth of people have seen their incomes fall for the past 15 years, while everyone else’s rose.
Not many Tories understand the benefit system: like Iain Duncan Smith, they never got their heads around the fiendish complexity and huge expense for negligible return of their great universal credit upheaval. A suggestion, floated again in the Telegraph this week, raises doubts about Sunak’s own comprehension: the Treasury flies a bizarre kite that it will replace the £20 a week uplift with a one-off payment, originally pitched at £500, now doubled to £1,000. That keeps basic benefits at a decades-ago low.
Problems are rife: what of those who fall on to universal credit after the bonus is paid? Will those finding a job have to pay some back? The chancellor apparently hopes this lump sum will set off a spending spree. But that shows how little any of them know about life on universal credit: 60% are in debt, many for money borrowed to tide them over the five-week statutory wait for their first payment. Splurging is unlikely.
What another 41,000 new claimants will be shocked to discover over the next three months is that the benefit cap is about to descend on them. They may not know they had a nine-month “grace” period before this particular George Osborne cruelty kicks in, but an average of £62 a week will be cut. The benefit cap limits payments to £20,000, ignoring claimants paying high rents. In the coming months, 250,000 people will be hit by this, says the Child Poverty Action Group.
Numbers on universal credit have doubled from nearly 3 million households in March to almost 6 million in November. The political question is whether these first-timers send out shockwaves to relatives and friends about the reality of social security, to counter the pernicious myths of a life of Riley on Benefits Street. This notorious dangling £20 note has even agitated the Tory press: polls show most voters want it paid, so my hunch is it will be, amid much self-congratulation. But don’t imagine this is any version of the Tories’ much-vaunted “levelling up” agenda, given our still pitiful benefit rates.
When it comes to levelling up, the questions of inequality will be the same, as always – it’s a nationwide issue, not simply north v south. Perhaps all the government ever intended is bribes for a handful of newly won “red wall” seats, but levelling up incomes, wealth, services and opportunities matters as much in Barking and Jaywick as it does Knowsley and Merthyr. And levelling up must mean more money for all equally hard-pressed low earners right across the country.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
