Cash to self-isolate would have saved lives, Covid inquiry told

If the UK had spent more money helping people to self-isolate during the pandemic then fewer people would have been infected or died, the former head of NHS Test and Trace has said.

Baroness Dido Harding, who was in charge of the programme in England, told the Covid inquiry she repeatedly argued to increase financial support, but was “frustrated” by the response of then chancellor, Rishi Sunak.

“There was an intransigence that I think was very sad,” she said in her evidence.

On 28 September 2020, the government did bring in a £500 self-isolation payment for low income workers on state benefits who were told to stay at home after being in contact with an infected person.

A parallel scheme of discretionary payments was set up by some local authorities to support those outside the welfare system.

In her evidence, Baroness Harding said the UK spent proportionally “much less than other developed countries enabling disadvantaged people to self-isolate”.

“If we had allocated more of the NHS Test and Trace budget to isolation support, I strongly suspect that fewer would have died and infection rates would have been lower with all the benefits that would have brought,” she said in her witness statement.

“It’s certainly the thing that I wished I had succeeded in persuading ministers to do,” she added in the hearing.

“But I wasn’t the decision maker. The decision maker in this was the chancellor and at every opportunity, from June [2020] onwards, the chancellor rejected the proposals.”

Last week, the inquiry was shown private diary entries written by the government’s then chief scientific adviser, Lord Patrick Vallance.

He wrote at the time that it was the “instinct” of policy makers to use the “stick” of enforcement and fines to convince people to self-isolate, rather than the “carrot” of financial support favoured by the government’s science advisers.

After one meeting, on 27 July 2020, he wrote: “Dido [Harding] pushed to get financial support for people to get tested in low socio-economic groups.

“Rishi [Sunak] reacted strongly to that and said basically: ‘Just stop the social interactions.'”

Baroness Harding, a former retail and telecoms executive who was appointed to lead the test and trace system in May 2020, said data in the first year of the pandemic suggested individuals were not being tested because they were “scared of the consequences of isolation”.

“To be honest, it was intensely frustrating,” she told the inquiry, adding that she found reading messages from the time “quite distressing”.

“We did try really hard to persuade ministers that [increased financial support] would be a good thing, not just for the individual wellbeing of those disadvantaged people, but also economically, as this was one of the ways you could have less economic harm for the country as a whole,” she added.

She said she felt chancellor Rishi Sunak had rejected her arguments as a “point of principle” because he did not want to create what could be seen as a new welfare benefit.

“I don’t think there was any amount of data and analysis that I could have put that would have changed his mind,” she said.

“I think you can hear my frustration as I say it.”

Rishi Sunak has not been called to give evidence to this three-week section of the Covid inquiry, which is looking at testing, contact tracing and isolation policies.

But, last week, Dan York-Smith, a senior civil servant in the Treasury, said a number of economic measures were brought in to support workers, including extensions to statutory sick pay and the furlough scheme.

He said the chancellor was particularly worried about creating “perverse intensives” which might have increased the risks of fraud, or meant some workers could be paid more to self-isolate than in wages.