Former Chancellor George Osborne has defended his austerity policies in government, insisting they in fact helped Britain to cope better with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry, Osborne accepted the UK had not planned for lengthy lockdowns and not prepared a furlough scheme to help businesses hit by the pandemic.
But when inquiry barrister Kate Blackwell KC asked if he agreed that “by the time Covid-19 hit the consequences of austerity were a depleted health and social care capacity and rising inequality in the UK?”, Osborne replied: “Most certainly not, I completely reject that.
“I would say if we had not done that Britain would have been more exposed, not just to future things like the coronavirus pandemic, but indeed to the fiscal crisis which very rapidly followed in countries across Europe.”
Osborne, who became editor of the London Evening Standard after leaving politics and now works in banking, told the hearing he had been in charge of fixing the public finances while in government, following the “massive economic shock” of 2008, when Labour was in power.
“If we had not had a clear plan to put the public finances on a sustainable path then Britain might have experienced a fiscal crisis, we would not have had the fiscal space to deal with the coronavirus pandemic when it hit”, he said.
The inquiry has heard Britain prepared for an influenza pandemic, but a coronavirus pandemic and its impact were not considered.
“There was no planning done by the UK Treasury, or indeed as far as I’m aware, any western treasury for asking the entire population to stay at home for months and months on end, essentially depriving large sectors of the economy like hospitality of all their customers for months and months to come”, said Osborne.
He said - if asked - he has “absolutely no doubt the Treasury would have developed the schemes that it did subsequently develop around the furlough, the Covid loans and the like.”
On lockdowns, Osborne accepted “there was no planning in Britain – or indeed as far as I’m aware in France, Germany, the United States, or anywhere like that.
“It wasn’t a groupthink unique to this country”, he told the hearing.
“There was no assumption that you would mandate that the population to stay at home for months and months on end so there was no planning for a lockdown.”
Asked whose fault it was, he said that “I don’t think it’s particularly fair to apportion blame because the entire scientific medical community – hard-working individuals with the best of intentions - were not elevating this particular possibility of a coronavirus that would have this level of contagion, have asymptomatic patients, and the Treasury or indeed the education department or the criminal justice system should pay attention and come up with some plans if that was to happen.”
He questioned whether the possibility in the early 2010s of lockdowns would have been treated as a “plausible plan”, but conceded the UK could have made preparations such as stockpiling PPE and having respirators in hospitals.
Earlier, former cabinet minister Sir Oliver Letwin told the hearing he believes it was an “error” not to appoint a senior minister to take charge of pandemic planning and tackling other threats to the country.
“There really ought to be a minister solely devoted to resilience at a senior level”, he said.
“I came to that view very gradually but by the end of my time I was pretty convinced that we ought to have, and, had I remained in situ, I would’ve tried therefore to move to a model where somebody took that position.”
