Former chancellor George Osborne has insisted that austerity cuts under his watch gave the UK the financial flexibility to cope with the pandemic, in his evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry on Tuesday.
Osborne dismissed claims that Britain’s health and social care capacity had been severely weakened as a result of his cost-cutting programme.
The ex-chancellor said there were more doctors and nurses by the time he left office in 2016 than when he assumed it in 2010, and claimed that public satisfaction with the NHS had remained constant.
He defended former prime minister David Cameron’s government’s record imposing austerity, saying that if tough decisions on public spending had not been taken in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, the Treasury would have been less able to afford the lockdowns and furlough schemes devised when Covid struck.
“In the absence of perfect foresight fiscal space may be the most valuable risk tool,” he said, citing Richard Hughes, chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog.
“The one thing I am sure of is there is no point of having a contingency plan that you can’t pay for and absolutely central to all of this is the ability of your economy and public finances to flex in a crisis,” he said.
Questioned by the inquiry’s deputy counsel Kate Blackwell KC, Osborne acknowledged that the Treasury had made no contingency plans for lockdowns, nor had it received requests, for example, to stockpile personal protective equipment (PPE), even though a pandemic was considered a top risk.
But, he said, it was doubtful that at the time the idea of locking down the country for months would have been seen as either practical or acceptable to the population.
“There is always the possibility that the cure for a specific emergency causes harmful side effects. Lockdowns and quarantining, closing of institutions all have serious adverse consequences . . . this goes to my mind to the heart of [a] very difficult question that [the] government of the day had to wrestle with,” he said.
He added that in the event the Treasury had come up with mitigating interventions relatively quickly, despite the lack of preparations. “I’m not clear that would have made for a better furlough scheme than the one we actually saw,” he said.
Osborne was presented with evidence from the Institute for Government think-tank suggesting that health and social care services had been damaged by austerity budgets, and public buildings were crumbling and insanitary as a result of years of under-investment.
“Even before the crisis began, public services had seen reduced access, longer waiting times, missed targets, rising public dissatisfaction, and other signs of declining standards,” said the IoG report cited.
“This context made it far harder to maintain acceptable standards while also managing a disruption as wide-ranging and long-lasting as that wrought by the coronavirus.”
Osborne was defensive, acknowledging cuts to local authorities responsible for social care and public health, but insisting that his government had tried to direct resources “in constrained times to the poorest parts of the population”.
The Covid inquiry was created to examine the UK’s response to and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and is due to hold public hearings until at least 2026.
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