The Times - UK (2022-01-19)

the times | Wednesday January 19 2022 25

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Covid fraudsters are being given a free pass

The decision to write off billions lost to crooks has the potential to turn into a bigger scandal than No 10’s parties

If Sunak wants any chance of

leading the country he needs to

address this anger. After all, the

chancellor’s largesse over the past

two years fuelled much of the fraud.

He will say he was only protecting

jobs when he generously handed out

billions of pounds of taxpayers’

money, but a fragile nation needs to

know that he will do everything he

can to claw back the £4.3 billion the

Treasury has mislaid, otherwise he

won’t be able to stand on the steps of

Downing Street and talk about

decency and fairness.

There are precedents for a

reckoning. During the Second

World War an obscure senator from

Missouri worked out how to claw

back money from war profiteers.

His name was Harry Truman. He

put the Renegotiation Act through

Congress to look at contracts that

were unfair, and it made his name

as a Robin Hood.

Sunak should do the same, rather

than giving up. The Treasury should

pursue these criminals, pressure

companies who took unfair

advantage of furlough, and demand

compensation from contractors

who never delivered.

The us and them culture of

the Downing Street frat house may

not be enough to lose the

Conservative Party the next election,

but the us and them economic

outcome of the pandemic could.

else being told to cuddle their pets

for warmth.

People are increasingly aware that

they are going to struggle after the

pandemic, in the same way that

many suffered after the 2008

financial crisis through no fault of

their own. It’s not just the red wall

voters: almost everyone is

convinced that a wealthy few have

gamed the system.

George Turner of the think tank

TaxWatch is furious. “The failure to

enforce the law sends the message

that making millions from

dishonesty carries little consequence,

and will be seen as a betrayal of the

sacrifices we made to support each

other over the pandemic,” he says.

“Not least because presumably we

will be paying back the bill for many

years to come.”

Boris Johnson won’t care. He

minds desperately about his own

finances but seems supremely

indifferent to the plight of others

struggling to pay food bills. No 10’s

new Operation Save Big Dog hasn’t

mentioned levelling up or those

who are living it up. It’s all about

tackling migrants and the BBC.

for mythical lost rent, there are the

people who suddenly discovered that

they could apply, with no experience,

for PPE and lateral flow contracts,

often from fast-track connections.

A few have made vast sums

cashing in on Covid, some by luck,

some by being unscrupulous, some

by being in the right place, and some,

like the supermarkets and the

pharmaceutical companies, from

providing desperately needed

solutions. There’s no sense any more,

if there ever was among the entitled

few, that we’re all in it together.

We are entering a new age of

inequality. The ten richest men in

the world doubled their wealth

during the pandemic, according to

Oxfam. Meanwhile most people,

having perhaps saved during the

lockdowns if they didn’t have to

commute, are already feeling poorer.

Nearly 900,000 in the UK have

been pushed into poverty in the

last two years, according to the

Legatum think tank.

Income inequality has increased

for the first time in a decade, despite

the prime minister’s insistence

this month that it had shrunk. Rising

inflation and heating bills,

tax increases, rent hikes and

spiralling house prices are causing

a cost of living crisis. It’s clear

that we live in two nations:

the lucky few fuelling the demand

for Rolls-Royces, versus everyone

I

t could all be over soon,
according to the World Health
Organisation. The number
of people gazing at two red
lines on a piece of plastic and
going back into hibernation is
diminishing. Most of us are
emerging, blinking, into a new
post-pandemic world.
We’re passing the national
emergency period of Covid-19 and
will soon enter the endemic phase,
when we take stock of what we’ve
lost and how lives have mutated, and
consider what we’ve learnt in the
past two years.
The country will slowly move on
from arguing about masks, working
from home and who broke the rules
on lockdowns, to finances. We are
soon going to be just as angry
about who profiteered from the virus
as we are now about politicians
who partied while many of our
relatives died alone.
The Times’s disclosure this week
that £4.3 billion of public money
lost to fraud in the pandemic will
never be recovered is just the tip of

it. Treasury figures show that

£5.8 billion has been illegally claimed

in the past two years from the

£81 billion Covid funds. That’s 8.7 per

cent of furlough payments, 8.5 per

cent of the Eat Out to Help Out

scheme, and 2.5 per cent from the

support package for the

self-employed.

Rishi Sunak’s anti-fraud taskforce

suggests that it has reached “a point

of diminishing returns” in tracking

down these criminals. Yet the next

day the Treasury announced that

it was going to retrospectively

pursue mothers who may have

inadvertently been given too much

child benefit. Hounding parents

who home-schooled their children

through lockdowns instead of

fraudsters who blatantly abused the

system seems an odd choice, though

an easy target.

It’s not just the companies that

took vast amounts of furlough

money and then paid their chief

executives huge bonuses, or

pressured their workers quietly to

continue their jobs, that are the

problem. As well as the second home

owners who claimed compensation

Almost everyone

believes a wealthy

few gamed the system

If Sunak wants to lead

the country, he needs

to address this anger

Alice

Thomson

@alicettimes