Taxpayers will be exposed to pandemic cost risks for decades, report says

Published

3 years ago

July 25, 2021

admin

Taxpayers will spend decades exposed to financial risks from the government’s coronavirus spending, according to a committee of MPs.

Parliament’s public accounts committee (PAC) has produced two reports related to the crisis, the first of which warns that Britain will be exposed to “significant financial risks for decades to come”.

The cost of government measures has already reached £372bn, they said.

PAC chair Dame Meg Hillier said: “With eye-watering sums of money spent on COVID measures so far the government needs to be clear, now, how this will be managed going forward, and over what period of time.

“The ongoing risk to the taxpayer will run for 20 years on things like arts and culture recovery loans, let alone the other new risks that departments across government must quickly learn to manage.”

Among the concerns is that, of the estimate £92bn in loans guaranteed by the government as of May, £26bn is expected to be lost as a result of bad loans to businesses.

But the exact scale of loss will going to be known for some time, the report said.

It added: “To make decisions and disburse funding more quickly, government relaxed the usual rules over the management of public money and took on significant financial risks, which government may have to manage for many years and which will have implications for future spending decisions.”

Another concern was the cost of personal protective equipment, where the committee said there had been “unacceptably high” levels of wasteful spending.

Some 2.1 billion items purchased were found to be unusable, at a cost of more than £2bn to the taxpayer.

The stockpile of remaining PPE was also “not fit for purpose”, the committee said, adding that this was despite a cost of more than £10bn.

As of May, out of the 32 billion items of PPE ordered, some 11 billion had been distributed.

Some 12.6 billion are being held as stock, with storage costing around £6.7m per week.

Some 8.4 billion items are still on order and have not yet arrived.

The second report concentrated on the prospect of an inquiry into the handling of the coronavirus crisis, an inquiry that has been promised for next year.

However, the committee said the government should not wait for the review before “learning important lessons”, calling for a recovery plan to be presented in the autumn spending review.

Dame Meg said: “If coronavirus is with us for a long time, the financial hangover could leave future generations with a big headache.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokeswoman responded: “There are robust processes in place to ensure that government spending always provides value for money for the taxpayer.

“We have worked tirelessly to source life-saving PPE to protect health and care staff, and we have delivered over 12.7 billion items to the frontline at record speed.”

Politics

Bitfinex database breach ‘seems fake,’ says CTO

Published

5 hours ago

May 5, 2024

admin

<div>Bitfinex database breach 'seems fake,' says CTO</div>

Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino explained that if the hacking group was telling the truth, they would have asked for a ransom, but he “couldn’t find any request.”

Politics

Labour taking ‘Tory crown jewel’ feels like a momentum shift

Published

8 hours ago

May 5, 2024

admin

Labour taking 'Tory crown jewel' feels like a momentum shift

It was a wafer-thin victory, but a huge win.

The symbolism of Labour taking the West Midlands mayor, a jewel in the Tory crown, could be felt in the room as Labour activists gathered in Birmingham to celebrate the win with their new mayor Richard Parker and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

There are moments on election journeys when the momentum shifts – and this win felt like one of them.

“We humbly asked [the voters] to put their trust and confidence in a changed Labour Party and they did. And that is a significant piece of political history that we’ve made here today,” said Sir Keir at his victory rally.

“So the message out of these elections, the last now the last stop before we go into that general election, is that the country wants change.

“I hope the prime minister is listening and gives the opportunity to the country to vote as a whole in a general election as soon as possible.”

This win gave them the boost that was missing when they won the Blackpool South by-election on a massive 26-point swing, but then failed to pick up the hundreds of council seats they were chasing.

This win, on just 1,508 votes or 0.25 per cent of the vote, was a body blow for a Conservative party that believed they could just about cling on. Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley mayor, is now the last Tory standing.

For Labour, then a moment to bookmark.

Just as Boris Johnson’s Hartlepool by-election win in 2021 was a low point for Sir Keir – he told me this week that he considered resigning over the loss because he thought it showed he was the barrier to Labour’s recovery – this too will feel devastating not just for Andy Street but for the PM too.

Labour has beaten him in a street fight. He’s bloodied with Sir Keir now emboldened.

“This was the one result we really needed,” said one senior Labour figure. “It’s been our top focus for the past week and symbolically a very important win.”

And Labour needed the boost, because, as Professor Michael Thrasher pointed out in his Sky News’ national vote share projection calculated from the local election results, Sir Keir was not picking up the sort of vote share that Tony Blair was winning in the run-up to the 1997 Labour landslide.

His latest calculation of a 35% vote share for Labour and 26% for the Tories, put Sir Keir winning a general election but short of a majority.

What the West Midlands mayoral win did for Sir Keir was to give him a clear narrative that he is coming for the Tories and will do what he needs to take them down.

It raises inevitable questions about what is next for Rishi Sunak. The prime minister had nowhere to go today, not one win to celebrate. The worst performance in council elections in 40 years, was already pretty much as bad as it gets before the loss of Andy Street. The former Conservative mayor was magnanimous towards the prime minister, saying the loss was his alone.

But colleagues will not be so generous. One former cabinet minister said this loss was “devastating”. “We’re done and there’s no appetite to move against him,” said the senior MP. Many Tories tell me they are now resigned to defeat and believe Mr Sunak and his team needed to own it, rather than the rest of the party.

The coming days might be bumpy, the mood will be stony. But Tories tell me not much will actually change for them.

For Sir Keir, he now needs to sell not the changed Labour Party, but his vision for changing the country. The West Mids mayor’s win was dazzling, but it could have so easily gone the other way. And as Mr Sunak fights to survive, Labour still has to fight hard to win.