Rishi Sunak was responsible for billions lost due to fraudulent Covid loans - Yorkshire Post Letters

In his first speech as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said “the aftermath of Covid still lingers”.

That puts a rather light touch on the very significant economic and health care problems still present and omits any reference to the key role he played as Chancellor from 2020 until he left office early this year.

About £33bn in Covid related expenditure, including unpaid loans, fraud in furlough and self-employed schemes, and unusable PPE may have been written off.

Whatever the final tally, the Treasury will never get all our money back, and on top of that is a £37bn bill for the infamous ‘Track and Trace’.

When Lord Agnew, a Treasury and Cabinet Office minister, resigned in January this year over the government’s decision to write off fraudulent Covid loans, he described oversight of these loans as “nothing less than woeful” and pointed to the Treasury’s involvement as appearing “to have no knowledge or little interest in the consequences of fraud to our economy or our society”.

The Treasury chief at the time was our current PM, Rishi Sunak. Rishi Sunak’s role in the government’s handling of anti-Covid measures was not limited to financial schemes and economic policy.

In September 2020 Sunak successfully argued against following the advice of SAGE, the government’s own panel of experts, to go into immediate lockdown, a decision which cost tens of thousands more lives and increased the pressure on the NHS with which it is still struggling to cope.

There is no ‘aftermath’ of Covid. It is still with us in the form of new variations and cases, persistent cases of long Covid, continuing vaccine research and vaccination programmes, and a massive addition to government debt caused by failures at the very top.

To say that it is ‘lingering’ deliberately understates the profound economic impact of these failures on current government spending.