Osborne insists austerity prepared UK well for pandemic

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.

On the same day of hearings, however, Dame Sally Davies, chief medical adviser to the UK government between 2010 and 2019, contradicted the ex-chancellor who was in office for six of the years she was in post.

Davies said inequalities and disinvestment had directly affected public health resilience contributing to high levels of child and adult obesity and diabetes among other chronic conditions in the population.

She also noted that compared with other similar countries, the UK was “at the bottom of the table” in the number of doctors, nurses, hospital beds and ventilators per capita when Covid struck.

But Osborne dismissed claims that Britain’s health and social care capacity had been severely weakened as a result of his cost-cutting programme and like former prime minister David Cameron at Monday’s hearing, defended the Conservative government’s record imposing austerity.

He said that if tough decisions on public spending had not been taken in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, the Treasury would have been ill-equipped to prop up the economy when lockdowns were imposed.

“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.

The Covid-19 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.

Questioned by the inquiry’s deputy counsel Kate Blackwell KC, Osborne acknowledged that the Treasury under his watch had made no contingency plans for lockdowns, even though a pandemic was considered a top risk.

He said it was doubtful that the idea of locking down the country for months would, at the time, have been seen as either practical or acceptable to the population.

In the event that the Treasury had come up with mitigating interventions relatively quickly, he said, despite the lack of earlier preparations, adding: “I’m not clear that would have made for a better furlough scheme than the one we actually saw.”

Osborne was presented with evidence from the Institute for Government think-tank suggesting that health and social care services had been eroded by austerity budgets, and had seen “reduced access, longer waiting times, missed targets, rising public dissatisfaction, and other signs of declining standards”.

“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,” said the IoG report cited.

Osborne acknowledged cuts to local authorities responsible for social care and public health but insisted that his government had tried to direct resources “in constrained times to the poorest parts of the population”.

But Davies said not only had the government failed to heed advice and plan properly for a pandemic, but that public health resilience was ebbing by the time Covid-19 struck.

“The government didn’t do the plans. But we didn’t have resilience either,” she said, adding: “You can’t get a good outcome if you don’t have resilience in the public’s health, resilience in the public health system — it had been disinvested in — resilience in the NHS.”

The one area that had proved robust, she said, was [medical] research and development. Through the development of vaccines this had contributed to saving “millions of lives” worldwide.