Ministers discuss relaxing work restrictions and reopening schools after Easter
Ministers are considering how younger people and key industries might lead the UK’s way out of the economic destruction caused by coronavirus, as they prepare to extend the current three-week lockdown beyond the Easter weekend.
Mark Drakeford, Wales’s first minister, said on Wednesday he expected the lockdown to continue across the UK next week while Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, said the country was “nowhere near” lifting the social distancing restrictions introduced on March 23.
The three-week review of the lockdown promised by Boris Johnson is expected to be concluded after the weekend, but intense ministerial discussions are under way about how Britain can gradually ease the current measures.
Tensions have arisen between the Department of Health, which wants to protect lives at all costs, and economic departments led by the Treasury and Department of Business, which are exploring ways to ease the lockdown while minimising pressure on the NHS.
Concerns about the economic damage caused were reflected by new guidance from Alok Sharma, business secretary, intended to reassure sectors such as construction and manufacturing that they should not shut down just because they could not guarantee that staff remain two metres apart at all times.
In a message to construction and manufacturing bosses, the government said work “can continue if done in accordance with the social distancing guidelines wherever possible”.
Bosses are told to encourage staff to wash their hands and avoid prolonged face-to-face contact if social distancing is not possible. “There’s a strong desire to get construction going again, for example, which has ground to a halt,” said one minister.
Essential retail, home deliveries, logistics, waste management and outdoor industries are also given advice on how to stay open, amid concerns that “misconceptions” about earlier government guidance were hitting the economy unnecessarily.
The CBI employers federation is also thinking about the practicalities of how staff return to work, for example whether companies will need to set up different parts of the office for people who have had the virus and those that have not.
“A young workforce release of this kind would lead to substantial economic and societal benefits without enormous health costs to the country,” the paper argues, although it envisages this would not be risk free for the young and could come at the cost of 630 premature deaths.
If it decided on a “youth first” policy, one Whitehall official joked that “you could even have a maximum age for drinking in pubs”.
The Warwick paper concluded that without a vaccine “it is unlikely that there will be any riskless or painless course of action” and releasing the young would help limit the economy’s contraction with only small risks. The rest of society would “begin to move forward by following the footsteps of the young”.
One minister said: “We are looking at a whole range of issues — populations, sectors, geography — to determine how we come out of the lockdown. But we need more data on how the lockdown is working now. There is not yet a fully developed plan.”
A big rollout of German-style testing and the use of technology are expected to form part of a graduated exit strategy which minimises pressure on the NHS, as could “herd immunity”, where gradually the population develops resistance to the disease.
Some in government are pushing a Spanish-style scheme which would have millions of tests of less than 100 per cent accuracy — accepting some would give false positives — but using the results to prioritise people for more accurate but rationed tests.
However Neil Ferguson, an Imperial College adviser to the government, told the FT’s Alphaville: “We don’t have a clear exit strategy yet.”
“Is there in some sense an optimal strategy which keeps the NHS functioning, allows more economic and social activity to continue than is going on at the moment and gets us through the next, frankly, 18 months?” he asked.
For now, opinion surveys suggest the public overwhelmingly backs the lockdown and are not in the mood to hear about exit strategies, meaning that ministers must talk about what happens next — and the economic consequences — firmly behind closed doors.
Source: Financial Times.
