Our Other National Debt

Repaying the people we owe the most after coronavirus.

May 2020

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Contents

Biographies 5

Overview 6

Section One: Our communities

The race for recognition: lessons from the pandemic for race equality. Sunder Katwala 9

Cherishing Childhood: how do we help the coronavirus generation make up for lost time? Kirsty McNeill 13

This place called home: protecting, respecting and standing with migrants after the pandemic. Satbir Singh 16

Essential workers should be essential voices: how can we ensure working class people are as integral to the recovery as they are to getting us through the crisis? Roger Harding 19

Too often forgotten: how do we create a country that values disabled people and closes the inequality gap we face? Marie Tidball 22

Love thy neighbour: how do we ensure the bonds of community built up through the crisis persist beyond it? Alex Smith 25

Stay at Home: how do we entrench the wins on housing? Rachael Orr 28

Vital voluntarism: how can we repay the charities and community groups who have been responding on the ground? Dan Corry 31

The parallel pandemics: who will pay the societal costs of coronavirus misinformation? Imran Ahmed 34

Section Two: Our economy

Plucking the goose: how do we ensure we tax and spend fairly in the recovery? Kitty Ussher 38

Whither welfare: building a stronger safety net for us all after the crisis. Ashwin Kumar 41

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We haven’t had enough of experts: how do we honour the contribution of universities and scientists? Josie Cluer 44

What’s working better: how do we ensure good work for all after coronavirus? Andrew Pakes 47

Section Three: Our public services

New age: what the pandemic tells us about what we’re getting wrong on social care and ageing. Sonia Sodha 51

How do we repay our debt to the NHS and the people who power it? Lewis Atkinson 54

Section Four: Our place in the world

Our debt to those beyond our shores: how do we reinvigorate internationalism after coronavirus? George Graham 58

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Biographies

Each of our essayists writes in a personal capacity

Imran Ahmed is the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate which studies and actively counters the use of hate and misinformation to polarise societies and undermine democracy. He is a trustee of Victim Support. @Imi_Ahmed

Lewis Atkinson works for the NHS in the North East of England. @LewisNHS Josie Cluer is a partner at EY, leading work on learning, education and skills, having previously worked in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. @josie_cluer

Dan Corry is the CEO of NPC and a member of the Advisory Boards for Big Society Capital, Impetus-PEF and the Centre for Public Scrutiny and a trustee of St Mungo’s, the What Works Centre for Wellbeing and 19 Princelet Street (the museum of immigration). @DanRCorry

George Graham is Director of Conflict and Humanitarian Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns at Save the Children. He is a trustee of Conciliation Resources. @georgewgraham

Roger Harding is Chief Executive of Reclaim, a charity powering young working class people to change the country today and lead it tomorrow. He is a trustee of Victim Support. @Roger_Harding

Sunder Katwala is the Director of British Future, the think tank focussed on identity, integration, migration and opportunity. @sundersays

Professor Ashwin Kumar is Professor of Social Policy at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Policy Evaluation and Research Unit, having previously worked as Chief Economist for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. @KumarAshwin

Kirsty McNeill is Executive Director for Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns at Save the Children and on the boards of the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Coalition for Global Prosperity and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. @kirstyjmcneill

Rachael Orr is Director of Placeshapers (the network of over 100 community-based social landlords). She is a trustee of the Refugee Council and Suffolk Housing. @RachaelOrrsome

Andrew Pakes is Director of Research and Communications at Prospect and on the board of LGBT charity Stonewall. @Andrew4MK

Satbir Singh is Chief Executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants which has been challenging discrimination, destitution and the denial of rights for more than half a century. @SatbirLSingh

Alex Smith is the CEO of The Cares Family (incorporating Liverpool Cares, Manchester Cares, East London Cares, North London Cares and South London Cares) and an Obama Foundation Fellow. @alexsmith1982

Sonia Sodha is the Chief Leader writer for the Observer and a Guardian columnist. She is a trustee of Trust for London. @soniasodha

Dr Marie Tidball is Coordinator of the Oxford University Disability Law and Policy Project and Cabinet Member for Supporting Local Communities on Oxford City Council. @MarieTidball

Kitty Ussher is the Chief Economic Advisor at Demos and formerly Economic Secretary to the Treasury. @KittyUssher

Proofreading for this collection was provided by Lachie McNeill.

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Overview

The essays in this collection have a number of things in common.

Firstly, each author has explored what coronavirus has revealed about our society that was perhaps less visible just a few months ago as this decade began. In every case, the author has identified at least one long-standing structural inequality which risks being deepened by the crisis. There are more inequalities (and intersections between them) than we have been able to cover in this hastily-assembled collection. The disproportionate care burden carried by women is already emerging as one enormous trend. The likelihood that furlough has changed who has access to not just pay but decision-making power in the workplace is another. And we will have to be unflinching in returning again and again to the most harrowing inequality of all – that which can be measured in the tragic tally of the number of people of colour losing their lives.

Secondly, each piece begins from a starting point of curiosity about who has made an outsized contribution – or faced outsized challenges – at this particular time. The wider social problems of our country are ones that these policy experts would work on in ordinary times but for the purposes of this collection each author has focussed narrowly on how we repay moral or social debts accrued or illuminated during coronavirus.

This is not, therefore, in any sense a ‘manifesto’ or attempt to cover every area of public policy. There is nothing in here about what should happen with the Brexit negotiations, the best recovery package for small businesses, the future of manufacturing, the right solutions to the climate emergency, the sequencing of national infrastructure projects, the next phase of devolution or the future of the Union. Likewise, the right way to deal with the actual national debt is a topic for another collection.

Instead, this is squarely concerned with which people are owed particular gratitude or deserve targeted support. In focussing on issues where a broad political consensus could be achieved, we hope to provide a starting point for joint work across parties and sectors in the months ahead.

Thirdly, it is striking the degree to which these authors point to a role for citizens and volunteers and not simply more spending or better policy. While the collection contains plenty of recommendations for government action, there is a strong sense from these authors that it is our own individual ability to empathise (or not) and our collective ability to come together (or not) that will determine what happens next.

Indeed, this sense from many of our authors that individually and collectively we have more agency than we think is perhaps the strongest flavour of all in this collection. Whether in examining our own (discriminatory or unkind) attitudes and behaviour or participating more actively in neighbourhood and civic life, many of these authors see a role for all of us in the recovery.

When commissioning these pieces, we wanted to create a collection that was one part think tank report and one part movement handbook. Like any other collection, we don’t agree with every recommendation that follows, but we have picked experts who can prompt a debate. The authors, therefore, were selected for their ability to mix the spirit of intellectual enquiry with an organiser’s instinct. We expressly asked for advice for readers about how to build the momentum for change, not just a vision of what that change should be. As a result, each author has charted a path to victory, but some are much more pessimistic than others about just how narrow that path might be.

These authors are all active in the policy arenas they have written about. They know the key players, the contours of the recent debate and the broad parameters (and constraints) of political and public opinion.

Some take great heart from the ‘viral kindness’ that has characterised everything from local mutual aid groups to national moments like #ClapForOurCarers and the BBC’s Big Night In. For those authors, the universality of this new lockdown experience might just be enough to generate the fellow feeling and national unity on which sustained and large-scale change will depend. For others, this experience might

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 7 be universal but that doesn’t make it uniform and they are worried that the same divisions that polarised us before the crisis might even have been exacerbated by it.

There is certainly a risk that moments of turmoil generate distrust. On the eve of lockdown we asked what the process for reconciliation might be that would heal the rifts between those who had taken the advice to #StayHomeSaveLives and those who had not. Now, just seven weeks on, the need for healing is even greater, with greater social stress between those for whom lockdown has been an inconvenience but not a catastrophe and those whose lives are being torn apart by illness, grief or the shadow of hardships to come.

It is made clear in many of these essays, but the idea bears explicit repetition here: the marginalised and minoritised rarely have ‘good crises’. More often, emergencies pave the way for the erosion of rights.

We had, with others, already identified some of the long-term trends driving division in our national life. The imperative to depolarise and democratise remains and has, if anything, become even more urgent. If our friends at the Collective Psychology Project are right and we are about to leave the ‘honeymoon period’ that often follows an emergency and are beginning our descent into disillusionment and collective grief, then we need a plan for how we climb out of that again with a greater understanding of one another’s pain and perspective.

This is a highly fluid situation and it is too early to say with confidence what the medium-term human and economic consequences will be. All we can be certain of is that working collaboratively in the national interest will be key.

One possible mechanism for that would be some sort of national commission charged with exploring how we have a fair recovery. While we are sceptical of the value of rhetoric likening the current crisis to a war, there is a valuable lesson to be drawn from Britain’s wartime experience.

In 1941, at the height of the war, the coalition government commissioned the Beveridge Report. It was an attempt, across party divides, to forge a new social settlement for a nation in mounting grief for people gone before their time. Eighty years on, a national commission could not be dependent on the genius of a few civil servants.

Instead, it would need to centre the experiences of those to whom we owe the greatest debts and be driven by an inclusive group drawn from each of the home nations, from villages and towns as well as cities, with mixed backgrounds across the public, private and third sectors, with a good smattering of cultural, faith and community leaders who can help us make sense of this moment. They could convene, over the summer, a genuinely national debate using mass participation tools and have an interim report ready by late September, marking six months since lockdown, and a final report in March to mark the anniversary.

There is certainly a case for a public inquiry exploring what could have been done differently in response to the crisis, but this would be something different – less about accountability for the immediate past, more about co-creating the long-term future.

This collective experience has undoubtedly changed our country. Nothing can diminish the sorrow of those who are grieving or the anxieties of those economically on the brink. A series of policy recommendations and campaign strategies in a collection like this certainly won’t do anything to lessen the pain. We hope, however, that in publishing these essays we can give some expression to our profound sense of gratitude to those to whom we owe so much. This is our own small way of acknowledging the size of our other national debt.

Kirsty McNeill Roger Harding

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Section One: Our communities

Our communities

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The race for recognition: lessons from the pandemic for race equality. Sunder Katwala

Every day, sombre announcements from NHS Trusts have told a story of service and sacrifice. How they mourned Dr Amged El-Hawrani in Burton and nurse Areema Nasreen in Walsall; how they remembered Dr Habib Zaidi in Southend and nurse John Alagos in Watford; how they cried for nurse Donna Campbell in Cardiff, Dr Muhanad Eltayib in Belfast, and porter Elbert Rico in Oxford. How grieving colleagues lined the street in St Helens outside the hospital to applaud the coffin of Dr Sadeq Elhoswh.

Over 150 health and social care staff have died during the pandemic. Over two-thirds of them have been from ethnic minority backgrounds, among them those whose families had come to this country from Pakistan and India, from Sudan and Egypt, from the Philippines.

And there is strong early evidence of a disproportionate coronavirus death rate among ethnic minority patients too. A Times analysis of the first 12,600 patients to die in hospital saw 6.4% of deaths among black people, compared to 3.2% of the population, and 8% of deaths among Asian people, who make up 7% of the population. There were 70 deaths per 100,000 people among those of black Caribbean ethnic origin, compared to a mortality rate of 23 deaths per 100,000 people among the white British.

Comparing death statistics to census statistics on the size of each minority group is too simplistic, however. Age matters too, given nine-tenths of deaths have been among the over-60s. A quarter of the white British are aged over 60, compared to 17% of black Caribbean residents, 12% of British Indians, and just 6% of those of Pakistani origin. If other things were equal, age demographics would be a reason to expect ethnic minorities to be less vulnerable but an Office of National Statistics analysis calculating age-standardised mortality rates sees disproportionate impacts on all minority groups.

The impacts on ethnic minority groups are unlikely to be even – and the reasons for differential impacts may differ significantly across different groups, as Lucinda Platt and Ross Warwick’s study for the Institute of Fiscal Studies emphasises.

The ethnic disparities will have complex causes. How deep-rooted social, economic and health inequalities interact; the composition and contribution of the NHS workforce and other public services; patterns of travel to work, of household formation and inter-generational contact; and brute bad luck from the geographic path that the pandemic took are all likely to contribute. Their relative weight will be a core question for the public health inquiry.

Why ethnic data matters

UK policymakers have been pushed to respond quickly to this emerging evidence. The British Medical Association has pushed for an inquiry into the pattern among NHS staff – and Public Health England has committed to investigate the public picture.

These are appropriate, important responses to what the data has shown – and they illustrate, too, the importance of having data to act upon. Yet only Britain and Ireland, among OECD members in western Europe, routinely collect ethnicity data, reflecting the outdated allergy across much of European public policy to ethnicity and race.

While race inequality enjoys relatively high salience among policymakers and politicians, civil society, academia and the media, this will not be universally acclaimed. In the darker corners of the internet, extreme groups seek to fan minority-blaming conspiracy theories, such as claiming Muslims have created the virus. Public communication about the causes and consequences of ethnic disparities should look for strategies that can delegitimise the efforts of extremists, without amplifying them with undue oxygen.

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How to talk about race: avoiding the “them and us” trap

“So you clap for me now?” was the theme of a video poem about the contribution of migrant and ethnic minority workers to the NHS. Its author, Darren Smith, said it aimed to foster empathy and bridge divides. The film seemed a missed opportunity to do that. That was partly about tone of voice: the message appeared to be less “look what we can be at our best” but a more resentful, “remember, when you clap, that you are worse than this”.

The aim of the film was consciously to subvert a “them and us” narrative but a broad public audience would not recognise themselves in this picture of resenting and fearing all migrants, before flipping overnight from blanket hostility to universal gratitude. Awareness of the ethnic minority and migrant contributions to the NHS has been reinforced in this crisis, not invented by it.

Online reactions were polarised. The already converted, celebrating the video’s viral potential, clashed with those who were angry and unpersuadable. Yet the film seemed to me to misfire not just for the audience it was ostensibly addressing, but to also miss the mark for perhaps a significant number of those of us it hoped to speak for as well. I found it jarring that the poem talked about “your food” and “propping up your hospitals”. Why not “our hospitals?”.

There is a persistent weakness in some pro-diversity arguments that are commonly used to try to counter “them and us” narratives which paint difference as a threat. However benignly intended, accounts of how migrants make a net fiscal contribution to the Exchequer and how cultural diversity makes the food better are “they are good for us” stories. That is still a “them and us” account. To transcend that, we need a broader story of the bigger “us” – about who we are and what we share.

From that perspective, the idea of society now owing a greater “national debt” to ethnic minorities may not prove an especially helpful frame. After all, Britain’s ethnic minorities certainly did not make any collective decision to make some kind of “blood sacrifice” to the common good.

So what we might “owe” ethnic minorities is simply a full and equal share of voice in our collective recognition of what this moment means, how we respond to it together, and what that means for a vision of a shared future. That would involve both symbolism and substance.

What next?

(1) Shape the coronavirus inquiry:

The urgent first step is to ensure that the initial inquiry into the causes and consequences of ethnic disparities is rapid, rigorous and practical. Attention has now shifted from hospitalised deaths to those in care homes too, but not yet to deaths at home, and in the community, which is where most excess deaths among ethnic minorities are taking place. The pandemic may be past its peak, but significant risks to health and life remain during the long tail of the months ahead. To talk only of deeper social inequalities may prove too fatalistic about interventions that could begin to stem disparities now.

So the Spring 2020 challenge for policymakers is to identify any responses in diagnosis, treatment and public communication which could help to mitigate the immediate risks without losing sight of longer-term structural causes.

Public Health England should seek to structure an inquiry process and outputs that avoids a sharp trade-off between those goals and timelines – so that immediate policy advice can broaden out to institutionalise a deeper, sustained commitment to addressing the broader social determinants of ethnic health inequalities that this pandemic has brought into sharp focus.

(2) Invent new rituals of remembrance

How should we mourn those who have been lost in this pandemic? Many people have lost relatives and friends without the usual rituals of saying goodbye. Local faith-based and secular services should be offered to those bereaved in strange times, perhaps drawing on the new models of local community group

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 11 cooperation Dan Corry lays out in his essay. A significant moment of national mourning will be needed too, alongside the creation of new rituals in schools, hospitals and workplaces. To reflect on our losses, we need a shared moment about what we have been through together, and who we are today, to which ethnic minorities would be naturally integral.

(3) Embed race equality in the NHS

We often talk about the NHS as a symbol of migrant contribution. We should perhaps say more about how the NHS best champions what true integration really means in our multi-ethnic society, as those of every ethnic and faith background contribute to something that benefits us all.

Nationally and locally, NHS trusts should honour the staff lost in this crisis. The post-pandemic era will be an important moment for the NHS to recommit to acting on race equality. Ethnic minority NHS staff make up a fifth of the workforce – and 44% of the clinical staff. Scrutinising perceptions of equal opportunity and voice at every level should include setting out a road-map over this decade for how NHS leadership can fully reflect the NHS workforce’s diversity.

(4) Renew the race audit as an action plan

The story of race, opportunity and disadvantage in Britain has never been more complex. There are persistently stubborn traditional inequalities in crime and justice; unemployment, mental health and life expectancy. There is a fast-shifting pattern of outcomes in education and work, where ethnic minority Britons are now more likely to have a degree than the white British, yet still face ethnic penalties on entry to and progression in the workplace.

The debate about the future of work, as laid out in the essay by Andrew Pakes, will be much enriched by stronger data, given this ever-more complex story of progress and barriers – across gender, geography and between generations.

Yet this remains under-valued, on both the left and right of British politics.

The left often claims that it already knows what that evidence will show, lapsing into a fatalistic narrative that nothing much ever changes on race. There is more work to be done, but the cultural left can sound strangely determined to insist, against the evidence, that all of the energy it invested into anti-racism over the last half century has achieved little or nothing.

The British right is happier to celebrate signs of progress – but struggles to acknowledge when its vision of meritocracy requires further action to break down barriers. Without this it may struggle to bridge both the persistent ethnic vote gap and the increasing generational gulf in its own political support.

The evidence from the crisis confirms the importance of the Race Disparity Audit, a pioneering public policy initiative that has lacked a public story – or a forward agenda to act upon it. Before this pandemic, it risked becoming an abandoned orphan child of the Theresa May administration. Both major parties talk about “levelling up” but neither has yet fully taken on the task of showing how to integrate a practical policy agenda for fair chances and no unfair barriers, regardless of class, race, gender or hometown.

5) Race equality is not a matter for government alone

Britain’s public conversation on race can be remarkably narrow. It is curious how often it returns to focus on three issues on which there has been welcome progress – overt racism in football, ethnic minority representation in parliament, and now the ethnic minority contribution in the NHS – yet rarely looks more broadly beyond them.

Now is the time to ask more from other institutions. For instance, when will any newsroom in London be able to match the ethnic diversity of the House of Commons? No FTSE 100 company has ever yet appointed a British-born ethnic minority Chief Executive, yet we have had two Asian Chancellors in a row. 37% of FTSE100 companies still have all-white boards and leading charities are even further behind.

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Beyond the pandemic, auditing the race for opportunity in this decade needs to stretch beyond government policy to the responsibilities within every sphere of economic, cultural and political power to demonstrate their practical commitment to fair chances for talent from every part of the increasingly multi-ethnic society we now are.

Sunder Katwala is the Director of British Future, the think tank focussed on identity, integration, migration and opportunity. @sundersays

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Cherishing Childhood: how do we help the coronavirus generation make up for lost time? Kirsty McNeill

Good and bad childhoods follow people around forever.

While some children are experiencing life on lockdown as the sudden permanent presence of graduate parents armed with iPads, limitless data and dining tables for desks, others are seeing their lives derailed by bereavement, domestic abuse or the abrupt disappearance of the support networks that helped their parents manage their disabilities or mental health. The impact of these months will be showing up for years if we don’t start thinking now about the right sort of emergency help.

The number of extremely vulnerable children is rising as a direct result of the crisis but the wider group of children we worry about at Save the Children – the 4.2 million children living in poverty – has just got bigger too. The DWP figures released in March 2020 showed a further 100,000 children had fallen into poverty in 2018-2019, continuing a ten-year trend of childhood poverty climbing back up towards the highs of the mid 1990s. Even before the coronavirus, the Resolution Foundation was predicting child poverty would hit the highest level since records began in the early 1960s.

We don’t yet know how many of the nearly two million new Universal Credit claimants have children, but we know from our own Save the Children programmes that there is an emerging group of families who are newly in crisis. The ‘newly desperate’ are the mums and dads who could just about keep the family going in normal times but who have seen what they pay for food and electricity going up with everyone at home. The pressure on family finances is enormous and throws pre-existing inequalities into sharp relief.

Childhoods were already profoundly unequal

Three inequalities in particular stand out.

Firstly, childhoods were already profoundly shaped by access to space. House of Commons library research points to increases in disturbed sleep, accidents, infectious disease and stress and other mental health conditions as a result of overcrowding, as well as the obvious implications for children not having a quiet place to play or study. Life in cramped accommodation was already tough, but life on lockdown is intolerably claustrophobic. For too long people with secure employment and a home of their own have lived a parallel life to those getting by on gig work or subject to flimsy protection in the private rented sector. Today’s circumstances must surely do something to close that empathy gap: it’s hard to be so oblivious to inequality when some people on a work call are in their home office and the kids are playing in the garden while others are on the one family laptop while the kids are crying to be let out of the flat.

There are specific coronavirus implications of overcrowding too. The latest research from the New Policy Institute suggests that overcrowding may explain why London and Birmingham have become such hotspots. Likewise we’ve all become familiar with the risks in care homes but temporary accommodation could fast become the next frontline with 62,280 homeless families living in temporary accommodation in England and 5,400 of those in emergency shelters and B&Bs with shared kitchens and bathrooms.

The second major inequality is in access to nutritious food. We already knew that poor children are much less likely to have a balanced diet with Dr Steeson of the British Nutrition Foundation noting that ‘a healthy diet can cost almost three-quarters of their disposable income (for families on the lowest incomes)’. Likewise, increasing research into both ‘food deserts’ (where people struggle to access an affordable supply of fruit and vegetables and have to rely on convenience shops) and the concentration of fast food outlets in poor areas shows just what families are up against at the best of times.

Jamie Oliver’s ‘Biteback 2030’ campaign is already warning coronavirus could prove a ‘double whammy’ for children, with supply chain disruption pushing the cost of healthy food up and the economic hit pushing family incomes down. The Food Foundation reported that as many as three million people in Britain were

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 14 going hungry, just three weeks into lockdown, while the absence of free school meals has hit the poorest hardest, with the government’s replacement scheme beset by problems. The third existing inequality this crisis has helped surface is the persistent learning gap. Figures from the Office of National Statistics show how early experiences of poverty show up in the lives of young adults in lower wages and higher unemployment. That divergence starts very young, with an increasingly broad evidence base that children’s brains are particularly sensitive in their earliest years. The Education Endowment Foundation puts the learning gap between children eligible for free school meals and their classmates at 4.3 months at the start of school in England. It grows to 19.3 months at the end of secondary school and by the time they reach 19, half of the children who are eligible for free school meals don’t have a good qualification in English or maths. That gap is now set to widen even further with OFSTED’s Amanda Spielman confirming those who were already furthest behind are set to fall even further back the longer coronavirus closures go on. Evidence from the Sutton Trust suggests children in private schools are twice as likely to be receiving online tuition every day and middle class parents have more resources to invest in their children’s learning and greater confidence in stepping in to help. Likewise online learning is out of reach for children trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide with Teach First reporting that only 2% of teachers in the poorest communities believe all their pupils will have the right access to data and devices and the Institute for Public Policy Research estimating that around one million children and families don’t have adequate connectivity. Secretary of State Gavin Williamson confirmed last week that promised laptops and tablets won’t arrive until June. Without decent access to learning at home, the effects of prolonged periods out of the classroom will likely mirror the pattern of the so-called ‘summer slide’ where all children fall back a bit during holidays but the poorest children fall back further. Finally, it seems likely that in education, just like health, racial inequalities could be exacerbated because children from Black Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities are at risk of being marked down in the teacher assessments that will replace cancelled exams. The intersection between class and race will play out painfully here too. Dr Marie’s Tidball’s essay elsewhere in this collection touches on the implications of school closures for children with disabilities.

Building better childhoods

It seems unarguable, therefore, that some children are paying a much heavier price for coronavirus than others. These inequalities were not created by coronavirus, but they have been both illuminated and exacerbated by it. They demand a targeted response.

Robert Halfon, the Chair of the Education Select Committee, has already suggested retired teachers could provide catch-up help for school children but an even bigger prize could be a national programme of catch-up support for pre-school children. Currently only 4% of the children who would normally be at nursery are there. It is at that level that the educational gap begins and it is the parents of the youngest children who are most likely to be in poverty. Why not have a free summer programme of structured learning and play for pre-school children, with a particular focus on getting the poorest children on to the programme? If there is a strong focus on outdoor activities and access to nature (which international evidence suggests is good for early development) it should be possible to design a programme that combines appropriate social distancing with plenty of fun for children who’ve been cooped up without the chance to play outside. Parents could either drop their children at the programme and get back to work or access skills and parenting support at the same time, knowing their little ones were in safe hands.

The most effective scheme would be coordinated by government to ensure that qualified early years teachers are driving the programme (and nurseries and other providers with tight margins are being given a cash boost to deliver it) but the charity sector is on standby to do our bit. Save the Children alone has 9,000 volunteers who already contribute their time and their talents to help children and our supporters would like nothing better than to be mobilised for a national effort for our smallest citizens.

The primary difficulty with getting any of these ideas adopted, however, is that the needs of children (particularly the poorest and the youngest children) just don’t carry much weight politically. Children have been largely missing from the national debate about the crisis (with discussion largely limited to the

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 15 impact on adults of having to do childcare or home schooling). As Social Market Foundation head James Kirkup lamented when introducing his own recommendation (for permanently shortening summer holidays), all the evidence about childhood inequality adds up to ‘an unspoken truth’.

It will take a concerted effort from families, the children’s workforce and child rights champions in the media, parliament and funders if we’re to put that right. Carey Oppenheim at the Nuffield Foundation estimates that 170,000 babies have been born since coronavirus hit the UK. That’s 170,000 families who have just had the life-changing experience of holding their new-born and committing to do everything in their power to protect them for as long as they live. That’s the basis of a powerful constituency right there.

Our most immediate priority, therefore, is building a broad and diverse families’ movement dedicated to putting children’s futures at the heart of our national recovery. The absence of just such a grouping was st made painfully obvious on the 1 of April this year. It was supposed to mark, as Prospect editor Tom Clark reminded us, the date on which child poverty would be abolished, according to the government target set in the year 2000. Twenty years on, child poverty is on the rise and political parties no longer vie to say their plans are the best to defeat it.

The key is not to shout louder, but to reach out further. It’s building an irresistible coalition for change based on three main principles.

The first, at a strategic level, is putting the protection of childhood at the heart of the tough economic choices to come. Children are truly remarkable. Their relentless curiosity about the world and sense that they can do and be anything is what makes them such a joy. Poverty both shrinks and shortens childhoods. No child should know when pay day is or how much is left of the electric meter. Our job is to elongate the period where they live in their imagination and that means relieving as much pressure on mums and dads as possible. No more overheard worries about Universal Credit or how to pay the rent. Our movement, therefore, will have to coalesce around one core political goal: making sure families are as present in the Chancellor’s mind for the recovery as businesses and workers were for the rescue.

The second, at a narrative level, is replacing a fixation on child poverty with one on good childhoods. A narrow campaign about child poverty will not be enough to galvanise political attention post coronavirus any more than it could make the political weather before it. We need to be relentless in our focus on universal truths that already command public sympathy, focussing on the notion of a good childhood and everybody having a right to one. More specific narratives about childhood deprivation simply ask too much of audiences who didn’t themselves experience life on a low income. Likewise talk of deprivation is too abstract when we could be talking about the tangible things every child needs – a warm coat in the winter, the chance to go on the school trip with the rest of the class, a present on their birthday and enough food in the fridge to have a friend over for tea.

The third, at a policy level, is to build the case for poverty as primarily an experience of diminished purchasing power and, therefore, exclusion from the collective life of our communities and country. There are undoubtedly specific issues around access to energy or meals or sanitary products and a whole host of other things, but the basic thing that unites fuel poverty, food poverty or period poverty is poverty. We can’t fix poverty without talking about getting more money into the pockets of the poor.

This coronavirus generation of children may not have been as at risk as our elderly relatives nor sacrificed as much as our heroes in the NHS and social care. They have, however, seen a disruption to their childhoods that will still be showing up in our common life many decades from now. This generation owes it to theirs to limit the damage by building a movement worthy of this moment – one which creates a much more equal future for the young lives currently on pause.

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This place called home: protecting, respecting and standing with migrants after the pandemic. Satbir Singh

Humans were born to move.

Across the road, across town, across the country and, yes, sometimes across seas and borders. It’s who we are and it’s what we do. Doctors, sisters, nurses, parents, drivers, neighbours, bakers, friends – humans.

We move for love, for opportunity and for adventure. Sometimes we move because we have no other choice. And, if we are lucky, we find a place called Home. It’s more than four walls (as we’ve all learned these past weeks) or a patch of soil and it isn’t always the place you were born, nor even the place where the grass is greener. “Home”, as the writer Naguib Mahfouz reminded us, “is where all your attempts to escape cease”. It’s wherever we can be safe, be ourselves, be loved and belong. It’s what we hope to find at all our journeys’ end.

Wherever we’re from and however (or whenever) we came to be here, we all deserve to live with dignity, security and some amount of certainty. But for years, our system for managing migration has been designed to treat the motives of those who wish to move here as suspect, to reduce over time the rights of those who arrive, and – wherever possible – to disrupt people’s chances of maintaining their status or settling here. All rooted in the assumption that hostility, conflict and exclusion are the only appropriate responses to the movement of people. As with the Windrush Scandal two years ago, the pandemic has laid bare many of the most critical, perhaps even fatal, flaws with this approach, while pointing clearly to the solutions we must embrace if we are to recover.

All workers deserve respect and protection

When we clap on a Thursday evening for those on whose shoulders we have placed this nation’s hopes and fears, how many of us realise that at least one in every eight workers in the NHS was born somewhere else?

A quarter of a million healthcare workers (one in three doctors and one in five nurses) are not British. One in seven care workers came to Britain from abroad to tend to our aging population. In some parts of the country, 40% of nurses and midwives are from BAME backgrounds, meaning that at some point either they or their ancestors moved here from somewhere else.

So how do we reconcile the exhortation to clap for our carers with the fact that just weeks ago we were told that anybody from overseas who earns less than £30,000 is ‘unskilled’ and, therefore, unwelcome? With the fact that care workers, domestic workers, cleaners and other key workers are made vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking by a visa system that ties them to their employer and leaves them at risk of becoming undocumented every two and a half years (risks which will grow exponentially under the proposed short-term work visa system for low-paid workers)? Or with the reality of staff at all levels of the health service who live with permanent anxiety about the next time they have to renew their visa – the forms, fees and official culture of suspicion designed to trip them up and find a reason to throw them out rather than supporting them to stay?

Beyond the NHS, how do we reconcile the thinking behind the proposed ‘points based system’ with the fact that it was the delivery driver, the bus driver and the warehouse worker, not the dotcom entrepreneur, the management consultant or the salaried executive, whose physical presence and underpaid labour helped keep our economy afloat and our communities running?

How do we express our gratitude to undocumented workers while we continue to deny them access to housing, healthcare and a pathway back to documentation? These questions take on even greater salience when we consider the risks to which low-paid migrant workers, documented and undocumented,

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 17 have been exposed, with no recourse to public funds, limited routes to challenge exploitation and, therefore, no choice but to continue working through the pandemic – often in dangerous conditions.

As Andrew Pakes has argued compellingly in his essay here, we need dramatically to rethink the way we value work. Britain’s workers deserve nothing less than a New Deal. But what would this look like for migrant workers? As a starting point, measures we must consider include:

● Jettisoning the artificial distinction between ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled work’; ● Providing all migrant workers with recourse to public funds so that nobody is forced to work when it’s too dangerous to do so; ● Decriminalising work and strengthening worker protections so that undocumented workers are not at risk of exploitation and trafficking; ● Making the pathways to long-term settlement more accessible, so that workers can build their lives with stability and security and without the risk of becoming undocumented.

Hostility is Lethal

For the better part of a decade, the Hostile Environment has sought to starve out people with irregular status by denying them the right to work or to access housing and healthcare. These measures have been buttressed by wide-ranging data-sharing agreements with the Home Office which have meant pregnant women attending doctors’ appointments and victims of domestic violence going to the police are at permanent risk of being swept up by enforcement officials, detained and deported.

These are dangerous policies at the best of times – and the Windrush Scandal showed just how deadly they can be when targeted at people who cannot show you their papers. But when the dust settles after the pandemic, we will almost certainly find that the rigidity with which these measures have been defended and maintained will have worsened outcomes and led to completely avoidable tragedies.

Elsewhere in the world, governments were quick to recognise that whatever their thoughts about irregular migration, the duty to protect life should not be tempered by a person’s immigration status. Portugal granted automatic, temporary leave to remain to anybody residing within its borders, guaranteeing access to healthcare, welfare support and housing. Across the US, many city and state governments launched public information campaigns guaranteeing that people without paperwork could access coronavirus testing and treatment without any repercussions. They recognised not only that this was the most ethically sound response to the pandemic, but also that nobody can be protected until everybody is.

In the UK, a small, temporary change to the NHS Charging Regulations allowed for the treatment of coronavirus without charging. But there has, to date, been no attempt to publicly reassure people that they can access healthcare safely, nor has there been any effort to amend or repeal the arrangements which see patient data automatically shared with the Home Office. Quite frankly, the steps taken are roughly what you get when a minister asks “what is the very least that we could do?”.

Two weeks ago, Elvis was found in his home, having died of coronavirus, simply too scared to go the doctor. He worked as a cleaner and his widow is a domestic worker. Whatever his paperwork said, this was his Home. He will not have been the only person to have met such a fate and these deaths will have been completely avoidable. The only appropriate course of action is to end the Hostile Environment once and for all. Nobody should be scared of their doctor or of reporting a crime to the police. Nobody should feel afraid in their Home.

Family Matters

Most of us fortunate enough to live with loving families will emerge from this crisis grateful for their company, their support and their care. Those with non-nuclear families will be grateful for the chance to sit down together again. To hug, laugh and cry together again. To mark all the birthdays we missed in lockdown and to mourn together those we lost. However high the camera definition is, Skype and Zoom just don’t cut it.

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 18

Yet in countless Home Office decisions, the division or separation of families has been justified for years on the basis that “modern methods of communication” mean that being forced to live on the other side of the world from your loved one doesn’t violate your right to a family life. You can Skype your wife while she gives birth to your child, attend your grandmother’s funeral on Zoom or give your daughter away at her wedding on Snapchat. Now that one third of humanity has participated in a two-month experiment to test this, I think we can conclude that nobody buys it.

We’ve all learned just how important it is to be close to those we love and how devastating it can be to be forced apart. We must make it easier for families to live together. Rules on adult dependent relatives joining family in the UK must be revisited and we must abolish the minimum income requirement which prevents 40% of British citizens (including many nurses and care workers) from being joined in the UK by a partner. With economic storm-clouds gathering, it’s more important than ever that the right to a family life is not tempered by income.

Division threatens us all

As with any laundry-list of policy failures and hardships in our immigration system, we will not get far if we avoid the question: how did we even get here? From the 1971 Immigration Act, introduced with the explicit goal of curtailing the rights of "coloured people", to the passage of the "hostile environment" laws in 2012 and 2014, there has been no shortage of effort from concerned groups and experts to try to work with government to do and be better than this.

But for as long as there have been migrants in this country, it has been a sound political strategy to blame all ills on them. If there is underinvestment in the health system, we can blame it on those arriving from overseas, despite the fact that if you find yourself in a hospital, you are more likely to be treated by a migrant than to be queuing behind one. And we can give teeth to our rhetoric by announcing performatively punitive measures, even when the experts tell us they are cruel and pointless. And we can hope that a big enough wedge of focus-grouped marginal voters will look away from other policy failures and blame the foreign born.

These policies have a real cost, they affect real lives, and the pandemic has highlighted just how high that cost can be. Because when we use migrants as a scapegoat, as the lightning rod for our insecurities and anger, we are all left poorer. We can already see the wheels turning. This crisis, and the coming recession, will be blamed on migrants as a distraction from policy failures.

As we all count our dead and wonder how many lives could have been saved, ask yourself this: do you feel any safer or healthier knowing that an undocumented Filipino man was left to die at home? Did hostility and cruelty to migrants bring a single person comfort and care when they were sick, lonely or afraid? And would we have been better prepared if we had spent more time asking why our hospitals were being shut down and less time perpetuating the convenient myth that migrants are a drain on the NHS? Wasn’t all of this conflict and division just utterly draining and, in the end, completely senseless in the face of a real crisis?

A just recovery requires us to be brave, to be ambitious and to confront these questions. One day (hopefully soon), we’ll be able to move again. We’ll see our friends, our colleagues and our families. In time we’ll forget what it was like to be grounded, to have a border at every front door. And though the end of the pandemic will allow us to leave Home, a just recovery must enshrine, advance and protect the rights of those who have moved to find it.

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 19

Essential workers should be essential voices: how can we ensure working class people are as integral to the recovery as they are to getting us through the crisis? Roger Harding

The coronavirus has illuminated who is truly indispensable in modern Britain.

While some are confident this will bring about new-found respect and reward for working class people, I’m sceptical. The financial crash also brought the sense that things wouldn’t be the same again, and they weren’t, but not for the reasons we hoped. Working class people rarely fare well during or after economic turmoil and, with the financial crash in the rear-view mirror, many of us know it.

I worry an anger is building in many working class communities about how inequitably the current costs and risks are being shared. Just like the idea ‘we’re all in it together’ after the crash, the idea this crisis is the same for all of us just isn’t ringing true. The disconnect presents fertile ground for polarisation, pessimism and populism to grow.

The pain in communities is raw and real – and it risks being deepened by middle class activists and commentators too readily racing to talk about the ‘opportunities’ this time presents. Working class movements can, however, start to think – carefully, cautiously, compassionately – about the things we can win together if we stick together. The young people at RECLAIM kicked this off with a rapid response campaign to thank #TheIndispensables but we will need to have a medium and long term plan if we’re to make sure Britain’s working class comes out of this time stronger and more united.

Right now, YouGov polling for the Times Red Box suggests that there’s a reasonable degree of togetherness but in a recent report the Collective Psychology Project highlighted that there’s a fairly consistent progression in collective emotional responses to major events. The initial ‘heroic’ phase is met with high altruism and is then followed by a ‘honeymoon’ phase of great togetherness and optimism. However, this relatively quickly gives way to a long ‘disillusionment’ phase marked by increased polarisation, feelings of abandonment and concerns about the limits of the response.

It is hard to say whether we have reached a disillusionment phase of this crisis, but the toll on people’s mental health is already clear. Ipsos Mori polling for Kings College London finds that half of us feel more anxious and depressed and 29% are finding lockdown extremely difficult (or expect to) in the next four weeks (notably rising to 42% for 16-24 year olds).

Working class people are already experiencing greater threats to their jobs (as reported by the Resolution Foundation), living in more densely populated areas (as covered here by the FT), not having enough space at home (as reported by the JRF), not having as much access to decent green spaces (as reported by CABE), having poorer lung health due to being more likely be exposed to air pollution (as reported by Asthma UK), being more likely to have underlying health conditions (as reported by the King’s Fund), finding it harder to get online or have enough devices for everyone at home (as reported by the Sutton Trust), having less ability to home school (also reported by the Sutton Trust), having less access to affordable food (as reported by the Food Foundation), being less able to access cheap credit (as reported by the Centre for Social Justice) and low paid workers are disproportionally represented in the key worker jobs that expose them and families to increased risk (as reported by the IFS).

Put even more starkly, Office of National Statistics data shows that living in the poorest neighbourhoods means you're twice as likely to die from the coronavirus as people living in the richest ones.

Strangely, I’m not sure that horrific reality is the thing likely to generate the most anger. Having a shorter life due to your postcode was already the pre-coronavirus reality. Instead it’s often the subtle, more visible things that anger people more.

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Who is (not) in the room always shows in a crisis

Being working class often makes you acutely aware of the little ways people unconsciously reveal they’re better off. Despite us now being physically separate, social media, video calls and simply how we talk about our lockdown experience is giving people greater insight into ‘how the other half lives’. People won’t easily forget their sneak-peek into the bigger, nicer, greener space of others doing less essential work or making fewer sacrifices.

This moment also tells us a lot about who makes decisions and what informs them. There’s one example that features frequently in discussions at RECLAIM. In early March, during the government’s new daily press conference, ministers and scientists provided guidance on what to do if you suspect someone in your home has the virus. It encouraged those self-isolating ‘to use a separate bathroom’ if possible. This obviously isn’t bad guidance, but the assumption this was more important to cover than how, for example, you deal with isolating in an already-overcrowded home, is telling. I similarly doubt the need for guidance – then flouted in at least one notable case – on whether you can use your second home will be forgotten either.

Some working class people will also be asking themselves why it is that old unemployment and housing benefit rates (the improvements noted in Ashwin Kumar’s essay) aren’t good enough now that it isn’t just them who need to claim them.

This sore created by the coronavirus is only likely to increase when our divides are further exposed by the lockdown easing. People will spot that middle class professionals are more able to continue to work from home and that middle class young people are benefiting from more home-schooling and tutoring (as reported by the Sutton Trust). The young people we support at RECLAIM already often flagged the state of their high street and related areas as top of their list of local economic concerns. Boarded up shops and ever-decreasing visitors are visible signs of something not being right, and sadly many high streets will look a lot worse when the lockdown ends.

In this context it’s not surprising that people hanker for the past. While activists on Twitter enjoy sharing slogans about how ‘we can’t return to normal, because normal was the problem’, much of the British public have been enjoying nostalgia. Recent research from Thinkbox, the TV marketing body, reveals a lockdown surge in the number of us watching old TV, with Last of the Summer Wine and Only Fools and Horses repeats doing especially well. Spotify has seen something similar, with increased subscriber use of ‘throwback’ playlists.

Part of why we get comfort from the past is that we see it through rose-tinted glasses. Comparisons (many unhelpful) are regularly drawn between this crisis and WW2. Our national mind’s eye view of the end of the war is the street celebrations of VE day. Many hope for something similar at the end of this period. What we don’t tend to reflect on is the disillusionment and anger many people felt soon after 1945.

While some people cautiously but thankfully dreamt of us building back better, many just wanted done with Britain. David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain notes that in spring 1948, just weeks before the creation of the NHS, a Gallup poll found that 42% of people wanted to emigrate (up from 19% in 1945). We also tend to ignore the post-war resurgence of antisemitism on the streets of our cities, showing that hatred and division can quickly re-emerge.

Turning anger into accountability

It’s hard to know what the exact dividing lines will be this time, but in crises there are always those who encourage working class people to fear one another. White people encouraged to fear people of colour, working people in towns and villages told to be wary of those in cities, southerners to suspect northerners and vice versa, and longer-standing residents urged to fear more recent arrivals. As Kitty Usher notes in her essay, one new split in this crisis might be those furloughed and those not.

We face a double threat here – populists on the right exploiting divisions and some on the left being parasitic on people’s pain. There are some who get excited by a crisis, despite all the human misery, because they see this as a necessary price for change. It’s often not even subtle: at one recent webinar

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 21 for organisers I heard a left activist happily tell people ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m really excited by all this’. Those don’t feel likely to be the words of someone who spends a lot of time truly listening to working class people.

We need to get past the anger and turn it into a drive for real accountability. The list of policy, societal and business responses needed to do justice to those leaning into risk or having to get by with even less is huge. This collection covers a good number of starting points on wages, job security (see Andrew Pakes’ essay), the strength of our social security (see Ashwin Kumar’s essay), housing (see Rachael Orr’s essay), our approach to immigration (see Satbir Singh’s essay) and much more. This will all be vitally important to honouring the country’s other national debt, but so will ensuring working class people have a permanent seat around the country’s top tables, regardless of which party is in power and whether we are facing good times or bad.

We need much more direct involvement of working class people in the decisions that affect our lives, starting with specific youth assemblies as part of the national commission outlined in the introduction to this collection. At every layer of society – not just in the professions, business and politics but in charities and funders too – we need class inclusion to be a core equality concern.

There is a very real risk an unrepresentative charity sector becomes more distant from the country when the register of which organisations survive is taken (as noted on race by Charity So White). As work we supported young people on last year showed, the current approach of some charities inadvertently alienates young working class people. If organisations in any sector want to build back better they will need to look as much at their own practice as the changes they demand in others. At RECLAIM we’re reshaping our work and are pleased to see a growing number of organisations work with us and the young working class people we support to go on co-discovery processes to work out the specific changes needed in their field.

Finally, we all need to get better at explicitly calling out those that sow division amongst working class communities. Emerging research from the US shows this is the best framing approach to counter hateful populism. This approach means campaigners on economic issues getting more comfortable explicitly talking about race and immigration, rather than always hoping to pivot away from them. This also means helping everyone to feel included by being explicit about how policy ideas deliver for working class people whether white, black or brown, a more recent arrival or someone whose family has been here for generations. Most importantly, to be successful this requires campaigners getting as busy delivering better communication messages to the unconverted as they can be debating how best to fine tune them with the choir.

That we owe working class people is so beyond question it unites the Guardian, Telegraph and FT. This situation is also changing so quickly that it’s hard to know what exact prescription of proposals will do their contribution and sacrifice justice. The only way to know for sure is to have working class people round the table when it’s decided. This should be a central legacy of this crisis, the idea that essential workers are essential voices. Working class people more than have the talent, strength and ideas to finally steer the country they so obviously drive. It’s time for all of us to make it happen.

Roger Harding is Chief Executive of RECLAIM, the Manchester-based charity powering young working class people to change the country today and lead it tomorrow. He is a trustee of Victim Support. @Roger_Harding

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 22

Too often forgotten: how do we create a country that values disabled people and closes the inequality gap we face? Marie Tidball

In early March this year, when the government looked like an outlier in appearing to pursue a strategy centering on herd immunity, for the first time in my life I felt raw, hot fear. When the cases and deaths began to rise and it was clear the UK was closer to Italy’s trajectory than Germany’s, I couldn’t really focus on how the Coronavirus Act 2020 and related policymaking would play out for disabled people like me in the UK. I had to turn my analytical brain off from my academic work on disability law and policy. Thinking of my toddler and what might happen if I caught coronavirus and was treated under the NICE Guidelines ‘frailty’ score was too much. I sobbed deeply. After ten years of austerity, I knew that disabled people would pay an enormous price and it turns out this pain has a name: anticipatory grief.

So in those early days, I had to turn to the small sphere of influence where I could do something practical, something that might help at a hyper-local level. I threw myself into the other part of my work life, as an Oxford City Councillor. It is this experience, alongside work with academic colleagues on our submission on disability to the Women and Equalities Commission Inquiry, which has shaped my perspective on what we need to do to deliver a fairer country for disabled people post-coronavirus.

The unequal impact of the Coronavirus Act 2020

Sadly the government’s response to the pandemic suggests little has been learned from the multiple concerns that the United Nations raised in 2017 about the United Kingdom’s treatment of disabled people during a decade of austerity.

In fact there has been a blatant disregard of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which we ratified in 2009, and the government’s Public Sector Equality Duty under Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010.

The Coronavirus Act 2020 and the policymaking in response to the pandemic have led to far-reaching changes to the law affecting every aspect of disabled people’s lives. These include reducing the number of professionals needed to make a hospital order under the 1983 Mental Health Act and ‘easing’ the requirements on local authorities to provide care for disabled people under the Care Act 2014. Young people with disabilities are facing further barriers to their education as a result of remote learning and assessment measures during the nation’s lockdown.

As evidence grows of the government’s devaluation of our lives and discrimination against our living them decently, they have been careless too in trying to accurately record our deaths. The anxiety disabled people have felt during the pandemic has skyrocketed. In the middle of a health crisis, disabled people should be in no doubt about their right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health without discrimination on the basis of disability. However, evidence is emerging on the inconsistency with World Health Organisation standards of the government's guidance on combating coronavirus in care.

With broad brush strokes the government is eroding our rights by permitting ‘easing’ of public sector duties and, rather than utilising local government as a buffer against increased inequality, the government has allowed local authorities to pursue only ‘reasonable endeavours’ to fulfil existing obligations. Concerns about the government’s focus on a narrower ‘shielded population’ have seen them face one of the largest class actions in history for being discriminatory to disabled people, as many were left off their vulnerable list and went without food due to the strict criteria of the government’s food delivery scheme. In every area, there has been insufficient incorporation and uneven implementation of the UNCRPD by the government in response to the crisis. It means disabled people are paying the very heaviest price on our liberty, dignity and quality of life.

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Representation matters

This tumultuous context creates an imperative to look forward and to develop a vision for disability rights for the next generation. Central to this is shaking off the medical model of disability – which conceives disability as derogation from the norm – and properly enshrining the human rights model of disability in law. This model focuses on the inherent dignity and inestimable value of each human being and places the individual centre stage ‘in all decisions affecting him/her and, most importantly, locates the main “problem” outside the person and in society’.

The government must undertake an immediate review of the Coronavirus Act 2020 and all policymaking in response to the crisis to comply with its duties under the Equality Act 2010 and commitments to the UNCRPD. It must then legislate to make the Convention directly enforceable in UK law and begin a process to harmonise with pre-existing legislation. The Convention already contains a powerful and detailed set of tools to help us effect change. It ought to be utilised across every ministerial department and tier of government. Resource should be placed with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to monitor and facilitate implementation. Disabled people are already mobilising and a campaign around this legislative change – the likes of which we have seen before – could be transformative.

Key to making this paradigm shift to ‘achieve the win’ is changing the law so that a sufficient number of disabled people sit at the democratic decision-making table. Whilst one in five people have a disability, 2017 research showed only 1% of Members of Parliament identify as being disabled. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is a central tenet of the Disability Rights Movement. For this tenet to become a reality of our Parliamentary democracy, positive action is required to elect the 117 MPs – that’s 18% of 650 Members of Parliament – needed to adequately reflect the proportion of the working age population with a disability. As I have written elsewhere, to do this requires amendment to Section 104 of the Equality Act 2010 on selection of candidates to allow for All Disability Shortlists, along with changes to the funding available for candidates.

The ability for the government to forget us during this crisis has been facilitated by our lack of representation in the House of Commons. Our sense we have been forgotten has been aided by the absence of any reference to us and our needs in official government briefings, themselves entirely inaccessible to many disabled people. Our invisibility de-values us. This feeling of erasure would be partially countered if broadcasters doubled-down on doubling the number of disabled people working in UK broadcasting during the crisis.

Councils are key

Next, local authorities of all tiers must be treated as being at the forefront of building a fairer country and bridging the gap between the immediate responses to coronavirus and tackling inequality post-coronavirus. As Cabinet Member for Supporting Local Communities in Oxford City Council, I worked closely with officers, other councillor colleagues and voluntary organisation the Oxford Hub to establish five Locality Response Hubs across the City. Doing nothing was not an option for us. Our strategy is based on meeting the needs of vulnerable people across Oxford and re-purposing the Council’s community service infrastructure to work with voluntary organisations, the Oxford Hub, and statutory agencies across the city to support vulnerable people most effectively.

Many local authorities are working extremely hard on the front line to curb the impact of coronavirus on their residents. Some, however, are also facing bankruptcy because the current financial challenge is so great. The public health crisis our country now faces requires more localised responses and organisation. The trail of inequality that the pandemic will leave in its wake will need to be tackled on the hyper-local level, with place-based solutions developed by local authorities in partnership with their citizens. For disabled people, receiving well-coordinated and resourced support from local authorities will be crucial in closing the inequality gap going forward. The government needs to go beyond its current financial commitment and seize this opportunity to enable local government innovation and world-class delivery of public services on people’s doorsteps.

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 24

No more so is this the case than in the role local government could have in ensuring decent housing becomes inextricably linked to the health and wellbeing of the nation over the coming decades. The coronavirus pandemic has not been a great leveller. As Rachael Orr lays out in her essay, people’s ability safely to self-isolate from infected family members and to manage the enormous strain on our mental health has depended upon whether they have sufficient bedrooms, space for children to complete schoolwork and access to gardens or outside spaces. For many disabled people, for whom it was too risky to have agency workers without adequate PPE or whose carers were unable to work, it is also about having sufficiently accessible homes that enable them to live as independently as possible with the support of family and friends.

The scandal of the deaths in care homes raises further questions about de-institutionalisation and high quality community living. For too long, adult social care, National Health Service provision and responding to the housing crisis have been seen as separate state responses to inequality. The apparent intractability of how to fund decent adult social care is in part because these things are seen to be discrete entities. We must use the pandemic to see them as inextricably linked. In doing so, we need to learn the lessons of the stark inequality of this public health crisis – so reliant on our housing to contain it – from the people who have lived it. Last year, Oxford saw the hugely successful Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change, the first in the UK. If the government adopted this model and worked with local authorities to establish Citizen’s Assemblies on Homes for the Health of the Nation across the country, this could facilitate this shift. Crucially, disabled people from every type of living accommodation and institution must be represented in such a model to share their experiences and vision for change.

Thirteen million people in the UK have a disability. Yet this important demographic is largely excluded from the curriculum at every level of education and is underrepresented in our academic institutions and children with special educational needs and disabilities face attainment gaps at every key stage. Consequently, disabled people face significant barriers in obtaining and maintaining employment, as well as a substantial national pay gap. Never has teaching and research on disability been more important in every level of education.

Taught courses on disability enable ‘consciousness-raising’ for all students; providing them with the tools they need to think critically about the application of their subject of study to issues affecting disabled people. Inclusive pedagogical approaches make it more likely disabled people gain the skills they need to flourish in employment. Increased awareness of issues affecting disabled people across employment sectors, and the greater inclusion of disabled people across workplaces, could facilitate higher employment rates for disabled people, as well as the development of goods and services which better meet our needs.

The two parts of my work life have taught me that inclusive education and an inclusive economy are mutually reinforcing. The coronavirus pandemic has placed our economy in a perilous position. A decade of austerity has shown that disabled people are most at risk of shouldering this burden. Alongside the urgent re-think of Universal Credit that is needed, we need a recovery strategy for an inclusive economy. This strategy must connect the representation of disabled people in the national curriculum with inclusive training and a recruitment drive for disabled people to be part of place-based economic solutions at a local level.

Democracy is an order of social equality and non-discrimination. We must seize this moment to take decisive action to close the inequality gap disabled people face and help create a country that values us. Our democracy requires it.

Dr Marie Tidball is Coordinator of the Oxford University Disability Law and Policy Project and Cabinet Member for Supporting Local Communities on Oxford City Council. @MarieTidball

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 25

Love thy neighbour: how do we ensure the bonds of community built up through the crisis persist beyond it? Alex Smith

My friend Lil is 87. Dyed-in-the-wool working class, she was born and raised in London’s Cally Road district – the sort of rag and bone neighbourhood they really don’t make anymore. Lil is a diamond, with the accent and stories to match. She will regale anyone and everyone with memories of evacuation, of love and loss, hope and heartbreak, mischief and misadventure. I’ve never met anyone that wasn’t instantly drawn to her charisma.

But Lil is also the first to admit that she’s lonely to the point of desperation. Her only daughter lives on the other side of the world, and the love of her life, who she both found and lost in her 70s, is gone. Lil can’t bear to be between four walls. She can’t bear it to the extent that she will sit in a cab and drive around her block on a Friday night, just to have someone to talk to, and she’ll be dropped off at the local chippy just to feel part of the world, rather than left behind by it. Lil is far, far more scared of social isolation than she is of coronavirus.

Crises have a tendency to bring to light things that we long knew were there but which we’d been too wilfully blind, too scared or too selfish to do anything about. In 2008, that underlying trauma was inequality. In 2020, what has been revealed is the depth and breadth of our individual, collective and national loneliness, and the insidiousness of the broader social, economic, systemic and discriminatory disconnections that underpin it.

In the age of coronavirus, we are all lonely now. Around the world, over 2.5 billion people are on lockdown, trapped at home much like Lil. Whole economies have become inaccessible to swathes of people who don’t normally know what it’s like to go without. The result is that, in the past two months, we’ve all learned about the cycles of despair created by isolation. Depression and anxiety have increased. A fifth of us are drinking more. Domestic violence has spiked. Food poverty is increasing. Loneliness is driving new challenges to mental health.

But while we’re all in this together, some of us are in it more than others – and that’s not just the frontline health workers. The increased drinking is more prevalent amongst those whose lives are most stressful. The poorest families will suffer food injustice the worst. Loneliness will hit hardest the people who were not already well connected, including older people and people in social housing like Lil. Most shockingly, as Sunder Katwala’s essay charts, people of colour are suffering both the health and social consequences of this virus massively disproportionately. This new experience has revealed age old disconnections, inequities and oppressions.

Sustaining solidarity

The hope is that governments, businesses and foundations, at home and abroad, will act to rebalance the concentrations of power and powerlessness in our societies that create these injustices. There have been indications of this already. Most powerfully, the Prime Minister’s singling out of two nurses who came from abroad to power the NHS and his own recovery ‘by love’ set the tone for a new era of empathy across long-standing social divides, and action to put the situation right. Surely, those in power can no longer hide behind obliviousness to others’ lived experiences as one of the ‘deprivations’ of their privilege.

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But without the pressure of a sustained social movement shining a light into the darkest places of our social, economic and racial inequities – and on the people who uphold them – can we trust those powerful institutions, which have so long been unaccountable for their actions, to act for the greater good once political expedience or advantage have run their course? For those who need a more equitable world – which is all of us – surely now is the time for a clean break from the past.

Lapel badges for care workers will just not cut it. It is already a badge of honour to work in the NHS or social care – to look out for and to appreciate the value in others. What key workers need are pay raises, the full cancellation of student debt, the right equipment, and a fully funded health service that prioritises prevention over cure. Beyond that, if we’re going to further recognise those at the front line of this crisis, let’s do it properly – with a national honours system that finally abandons the reference to Empire and replaces it with a celebration of the diversities of contribution.

More broadly, we need to turn this social care crisis into a social change opportunity. That will require nothing less than radical systems and culture change – to value and respect the people whose experiences have been so long marginalised or ignored, and to build new institutions that are inclusive, st enabling, and fit for the 21 century.

At the national level, we should start by converting the now-defunct Department for Leaving the European Union into a Department for Connection, with the same £100 million budget to drive the recovery in communities and to harness the connections that have sustained us through this moment. The department would spur local activity and agency in the communities that need it most, drive new bottom-up research that captures the value of informal neighbourliness as well as formal volunteering, and fund new initiatives that build bonds and share capital across divides. A first priority would be to segment by postcode the 750,000 people who signed up to support the NHS but are presently ‘furloughed’ from that opportunity due to the government’s operational overreach, and to mobilise people to help out in their local communities in the longer term. The department would also look at the feasibility of a 1p levy on self-service checkout transactions, to fund projects tackling our disconnection crisis.

Second, we should create a Neighbour Day as they have in Australia – an ‘annual celebration of community, encouraging people to connect with those who live in their neighbourhood.’ With permission and less regulation, street parties would abound, and the value of human relationships seen during this crisis would be there for individual as well as global moments of crisis.

A role for us all

National decision-makers can do their part, but social security can’t call our parents for us, and government policy can’t on its own create more neighbourliness. So we also need culture change at the local level. It’s one of the great contradictions of British life that while 72% of UK adults believe that knowing our neighbours is important, 73% do not know their neighbours themselves. Our ‘keep calm and carry on’ mentality has led us to be passive to the point where we’ve allowed something we value deeply to diminish. So we each need to be responsible for our communities’ collective resilience and wellbeing – looking up from our phones, intentionally connecting across different life experiences and asking people we might never otherwise meet, ‘how’s your day?’. Doing that will improve our individual and collective wellbeing. More importantly, it will deepen our empathy.

Pushing back against this fundamental re-balancing of power and powerlessness will be an instinct to return to business as usual. Some politicians will continue to prioritise economic health over public health, GDP over wellbeing, what’s efficient for our businesses over what’s important for our communities. Those instincts risk taking us to more nationalistic or individualistic positions at a time when we’ve seen – now and in the past – that these moments call for togetherness at home and abroad. I’ve been reassured over the past month by senior business leaders who have told me ‘we will never, ever again forget the importance of community’, just as I’ve been reassured by the raising of empathy and the sharing of stories of connection by leaders, corporations and some elements of the media. It’s the job now of people in communities to hold those feet to the fire, to reject future austerity, to demand ethical economics, and to raise up new stories that spread the action, voice and power in relationships.

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That’s how we’ll repay our other national debt – by recognising the richness in people’s lived experiences; by reclaiming space so that communities are for everyone; by shifting systems so that they’re more accessible and inclusive; by having a national conversation that is honest about our abuses of power over centuries; and by edging culture towards recognising and investing in the value and power in local relationships that lift people up. As Lil once told me, ‘it’s not what you know but who you know that counts – and it doesn’t take much to be kind to others.’

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Stay at Home: how do we entrench the wins on housing? Rachael Orr

Overnight, all our worlds became very small. Our homes are suddenly everything – our offices, our schools, our gyms, our pubs, our spaces for creativity.

This means the great inequalities in our housing market are being felt so much more acutely. For some, there’s a garden or a spare room for a bit of peace and quiet or an office space to work from home.

But if you’re a family of five in a one bed flat without any outside space, weeks of lockdown are making you feel trapped, suffocated. Working from home isn’t so easy when your shared house doesn’t have a living room and your workspace is your bed.

Government advice about isolating in a different room from your family is often simply not possible. The cruelty of the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ is now clear: it specifically denies people in social housing the right to space.

In all our neighbourhoods there will be carers, nurses and hospital porters who are risking their lives to care for us and then returning to homes that are too small, damp or even dangerous.

We know too that there are thousands of people trapped in truly awful circumstances: if you are a family spending lockdown in temporary accommodation you are likely to be in a hotel or a B&B, confined to one room, sharing a bathroom or a kitchen with strangers.

And, of course, there are so many people for whom home is not a sanctuary. 14 women and two children were killed at home in the first three weeks of lockdown. Domestic violence helplines are reporting huge increases in people seeking help.

We do not have the available properties to move all these families into when lockdown ends, yet surely we all feel more powerfully than ever that we owe them a decent, safe home to call their own.

Coronavirus has also revealed the precariousness of renting in the private rented sector. Yes, there have been wonderful landlords reassuring their tenants that they will keep their homes come what may. But there are thousands of renters who are terrified that they will be evicted as lockdown eases. That you are at the whim of your landlord’s compassion was best summed up by the tweet from the paramedic who reported his landlord was evicting him as he ‘couldn’t risk’ the virus coming in to ‘his’ property.

Too many people housed in the private rented sector are paying unaffordable rents that are causing huge personal stress. We have seen the government temporarily increase benefit levels for those in the private rented sector, an acknowledgement of how far behind real rent levels benefit rates were. Making this change permanent would be a real help, but what so many households renting privately need is social housing.

Homes fit for our (new) heroes

The spotlight coronavirus has shone on the housing crisis is pretty bleak. So what possible grounds can we have for optimism? And what is our strategy for achieving change?

Firstly, communication is key. The whole nation has suddenly felt what the housing crisis means – for better or worse. We have to appeal directly to all those who have found such comfort in their home during this time to support the building of new homes.

There are many loud voices who oppose development at nearly every turn, especially the development of social housing. Now is the time to speak out and drown these voices out. This means signing petitions

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 29 and joining campaigns. It means supporting housing developments locally. It means those of us working in housing working even harder with new councillors, who are often the ones to approve or turn down planning applications, to feel confident in making the case for building. It means talking to people with all the emotion we associate with home, rather than through the technical jargon of housing policy.

We have to build public support to ensure that building new social housing is seen as central to our economic and social recovery.

The last major housebuilding effort this country saw was after the Second World War (following a similar but smaller one as part of the ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ drive after the First World War). Times of shared danger and common endeavour have historically been the spur to build high quality new homes in this country and that must be recaptured as part of our post-coronavirus settlement.

Immediately, Housing Associations and local authorities should be able to acquire land as quickly and cheaply as possible. Likewise, they should be able to buy new homes that can’t sell on the open market at vastly reduced rates and let them to people who need them most. This should be followed by significant government investment to kick start building – providing new, affordable homes and thousands of jobs. There is a real opportunity to think differently about how we build with digital modelling and various kinds of factory-build complementing traditional housebuilding.

Homes fit for heroes of the coronavirus crisis and those who have been most impacted by it. Homes which are affordable, built to the highest environmental standards, with outside space.

We have to make sure the volume housebuilders understand their responsibilities in a mass home building programme. Too often new homes are found to be of poor quality, and some of the smallest in Europe. It’s easy to reject development if this is what we are building. We have to be creating homes and places we would all be proud to live in.

We have to show too that building new homes isn’t just about our own front doors, it’s about creating and investing in communities.

Places for people

For many, being cut off from friends and family means our relationships in the places we live have transformed. Street WhatsApp groups provide support and kindness. Socially-distanced evening drinks are starting with more and more of us having a glass of something on our doorsteps and shouting across the road to others, seeing friendly faces, having some company.

Local mutual aid groups are organising and providing shopping, nappies, pharmacy deliveries to neighbours. And, of course, the Thursday evening ritual of clapping to show our appreciation for those on the frontline of the crisis. The power of these few minutes is amazing: not just to show our thanks but to do so together. We look forward to it each week.

As we have been changing individually there has been much change for organisations too.

PlaceShapers’ members exist to build social and affordable homes. But they have always been proud to be much more than a landlord, working with and serving their residents and wider communities.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the last month. Helplines and online support have been bolstered to help those worried about their finances. Residents are being reassured that they won’t lose their homes if they can’t pay their rent due to loss of income during coronavirus. Everywhere I look, social landlords’ repairs staff – who can’t currently carry out anything other than essential property repairs – are being repurposed as food delivery drivers. In some places staff are helping reopen hospitals. Thousands of phone-calls are being made each week to older residents or isolated people to ensure they have the support they need. Millions of pounds are being invested in community hardship funds, with schemes delivered in partnership with local authorities and other partners.

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The response of individuals and organisations has created a new strength in our communities, one which many feared had been lost. Now is the moment for us all to rethink how we relate to and support the people with whom we share a street or estate, but not necessarily a common life until now. New initiatives and partnerships will be needed more than ever in the years to come. The social recovery we can build together is every bit as important as the economic one, as Ashwin Kumar’s essay touches on.

The power of common endeavour

The final thing we must do is to continually remind ourselves, and government, of what is possible. For now, we can point to this time in history when we, as a nation, ended rough sleeping.

Following a huge, valiant partnership effort, more than 5,000 rough sleepers were moved off the streets in 72 hours. Support is being provided to them from staff working across housing associations, charities and voluntary groups. What’s more, the government’s coronavirus legislation effectively made rough sleeping illegal. It may not have been for the altruistic reasons campaigners champion but the end point is that we do not have thousands of people sleeping rough on our streets tonight.

Of course, the real work begins now. What happens when hotels want their rooms back, to let to paying guests? Then we have a choice: do we let people who have a chance to turn their lives around go back to the streets or do we come together to try and ensure they are supported to have a permanent home? This is the time to do all we can ensure it’s the latter.

The housing story of the last few weeks makes it irrefutable that with funding and political will we can achieve amazing things. What’s true for housing can be true for other issues too. We have to keep shouting about the power of this spirit of common endeavour.

Of course, we could be sitting here in a year’s time with the housing crisis even more severe, more people sleeping rough, more people threatened with eviction. We’re not naive, we know what’s at stake if we don’t win anything on housing.

But if we can continue to rethink how we work together in our communities to support each other; if housing providers can show that these communities are the foundation for our social recovery and new social housing is the foundation to our economic one; if we can keep showing the government what we have changed together; and if we can keep bringing together with us all those people who felt such gratitude in the sanctuary of their home during this most challenging of times: then, we might just be able to ensure our post-coronavirus country is one that provides decent, safe homes for everyone.

Rachael Orr is Director of Placeshapers (the network of over 100 community-based social landlords). She is a trustee of the Refugee Council and Suffolk Housing. @RachaelOrrsome

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Vital voluntarism: how can we repay the charities and community groups who have been responding on the ground? Dan Corry

The charity and community sector is something that policy types often fail to realise even exists. It is a ‘nice’ but slightly peripheral part of the body politic that sits somewhere between the private and state sector, a sort of residual, a sector that tries to mop up some of the things that the state and private sector do not do. On the right, there is often deep distrust of it if it is anything more than small and local, or cultural and non-threatening. On the left, while trade unions and co-ops are generally welcomed, there is often a suspicion that charities should not be there and would not be if we could just make the state that bit bigger and a bit more all-encompassing.

The coronavirus crisis – in its speed, universality and depth – has revealed what those of us who work in the sector have always known: voluntary efforts are a crucial guarantor of a decent society and indeed a strong and fair economy. There is now surely no serious politician, on right or left, who is anything but admiring of the way charities and local groups – already established or new ones that have sprung up – are supporting our NHS and our care workers; helping those under stress; getting food to those isolated; and looking after those trapped at home in abusive relationships. The voluntary sector has done that with its finances all over the place, not least as fundraising – often very reliant on events – and other income streams have dried up. Meanwhile, government schemes aimed at supporting the private sector have played themselves out very awkwardly for the non-profits, either being irrelevant (what foodbank or homeless shelter wants to furlough front line staff?) or impossible (try getting a loan from a bank if you are a charity or community organisation!).

Whenever there is a major crisis like this, many things emerge and many things – both bad and good – are discovered.

The bad

On the negative side we will undoubtedly have lost some good organisations at national and especially local level; the ones that will survive are not necessarily the ones we in some sense needed most or the ones that were best managed. The charity and community sector does not tend to work like that. In addition, many of the worst-hit charities and community organisations will be the ones serving communities also worst hit by the crisis. Those on lower incomes, BAME communities, those who are frail, older or vulnerable in other ways will have all seen indispensable organisations go under.

Many organisations that survive will have been ravaged, have lost staff, have had to stop doing many good things they did in the past. Reserves – that charities are criticised if they have too much of – will be virtually gone. Risk aversion on finance will rise up the agenda of all trustee boards. And grant income will be too scarce: independent charitable foundations and grant makers thankfully pushed a lot of cash out fast and will be depleted as charities come asking for non-coronavirus funding. And all this will be added to when post the crisis we are likely to have severe economic problems. While the recent Office of Budget Responsibility forecast was horrific, it suggested good news in the form of a fast bounce back. That feels optimistic to say the least.

The good

But many good things have emerged in the sector in this period as people focused on need, on getting things done (and getting them done fast) and on adapting in a way that would take decades in the charitable sector in normal times. A proverbial rocket was put up a sector that was struggling and some of that has been for the good.

We have seen collaboration across the sector in ways so rarely seen as the real focus on the urgent beneficiary need trumped any other consideration. We at NPC have heard from groups saying that in their

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 32 geographic area the working together of different charities, funders and the local council has been better than ever before. Foundations have made some good attempts to coordinate more and to move faster and philanthropists have tried to understand how best to help – something NPC has encouraged. Some funders even used data and shared it (often via 360 giving and now through more easily accessible data). Big charities have supported smaller ones, breaking down some of the usual suspicion and unhelpful hostility between the two.

Alongside this we have seen tremendous innovation and agility with new things being tried and adapted as we went along in response to real time user feedback and other evaluations. Equally profoundly, charities have had to quickly assess what mattered in what they did and what did not, who was vital and who was not.

The lockdown has also created a breakthrough in the use of digital technology that has been mostly to the good for a sector that historically struggles to understand, embrace and secure funding in this area. This is not just about endless Zoom or Teams meetings between staff but trying to see how technology can be used to help all sorts of people and how to use it to identify emerging needs and organise ourselves towards them. And, crucial for a sector that cares about the vulnerable, it’s prompted some hard questions about what to do with those who don’t have or can’t manage the technology.

Volunteering has seen a massive surge both locally to mutual aid organisations, food banks and other local charities, and to the national NHS scheme. Charities have had to learn fast some of the things that many had forgotten – how to absorb, organise and utilise volunteers. Kirsty McNeill’s essay touches on one idea for more of that in the future.

Partly due to volunteering and partly due to the need for support from the charity sector, we have seen a different and better relationship with the public sector – especially the NHS. Cooperation has been in vogue, rather than seeing life as a struggle, often through the confrontational means of bidding for contracts.

A mirror up to society

One other interesting thing about the crisis is the issues it has highlighted. What people really value and what really matters has come into better focus. Our interconnections and relationships, something that lies at the heart of what so many charities try to do – and is often sadly absent from the ways the state delivers services – has been highlighted.

So too has been the exposure of how unequal our society is and how many are vulnerable – again a passion of so many in civil society. While many have tweeted away about their gardens and zoomed from their spare room or study, others have no outside space, no rooms in which they can be alone. And while all classes and ethnicities have been hit, the burden of deaths has been on those with previously underlying conditions as well as doing jobs that expose them. The burden is disproportionately on the poor and people who are marginalised by discrimination and existing inequalities.

None of this is to suggest that the charity and community sector is perfect. It has many flaws. It is incredibly uneven in quality; is not universal; relies on often pretty random funding flows; it is active where it ‘chooses’ to be so, not necessarily where the need is greatest. It is no substitute at all for the state but, at its best, is a key partner to it as well as playing its own independent role.

Some in the sector hope that this crisis has allowed the policy community to see at last that the charity sector really does matter – although others have taken the fact that the sector secured ‘only’ £750m as a special package as a sign policymakers still don’t care or get it.

Three versions of the future

How might it all play out post crisis? I can imagine three futures.

It is unlikely that the sector can fully go back to exactly how it was before the crisis – the economic pressures will be, and already are, too much and many charities are likely to fail. The focus on frontline

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 33 coronavirus response charities will inevitably skew the sector too. But even with this in mind, there are still 3 scenarios.

The first is back largely to the status quo before the crisis. The power of the old order pulls us back towards it. Government puts the sector back in its box and the public, while pleased it existed during the crisis, pulls back from the civil action they had embraced, just as they did post the volunteering boom of the 2012 Olympics. Charities retreat to caring about themselves, many of the good things go and independent funders go back to their old ways of less core funding and doing their own thing.

The second is a radical change in the relationship with the state and public services at all levels and in the way charities and funders behave. Governments want to be a good partner and so instead of struggling with the role of charities, now understand the critical role they will play in rebuilding society after the economic downturn and proactively 'build' the sector into their vision and plans for the future prosperity and 'levelling up' of this country – rather than a 'nice to have'. At local level the power of community action is seen as a massive plus by council leaders, not just an annoying and messy threat. Meanwhile, the public are now up for trying to address the challenges that so many charities have been going on about for ages and with attitudes to public spending changed for good. Within the sector we see built out of the wreckage new collaborations, purposeful mergers and new partnerships as charities embrace the opportunity to rethink how they are formed and how they can best deliver on their missions. Nobody wants to go back to the old, slow, cautious ways. Pace, innovation, being closer to the communities we serve all take off.

The third is that we get a mixed world. Government likes what the sector did to help in some areas so takes it seriously here and there – like in mental health – but generally goes back to seeing it as a nice frill, but totally dispensable. Some local councils get it and harness the energy and new relationships that emerged through the crisis, but most hunker down as finance is tight and partnership is difficult. Within the sector itself, some go back, some move on – we end up with a much more varied sector. Funders are not sure whether to still fund the older approaches or bet on the new: some want to continue to collaborate, others pull back remembering how difficult it is.

The determinants as to which future we get are of course a lot about the appetite of the charities and funders for embracing the opportunity for real change and progress. Will they be cautious and stay in their respective safe places or will they be bold, and take risks?

But they are also about the attitude of policy makers and government at national, city region and local level as to explicitly recognising the voluntary and community sector as crucial to our future prosperity and our wellbeing.

This breakthrough of recognition is the key. Once secured there are many things that can be done (see Corry and Stoker for some ideas). We might even have realised that many of these charities are vital to underpin and support the public and public services and look for new models of funding that, while respecting and maintaining their independence, stop forcing them to rely for basic funding on charity events and to survive on their reserves; matched funded endowments for instance and guaranteed long term grant agreements in some areas.

Our national and economic recovery will depend on the choices of our political leaders, the commitment of staff in our public services and the dynamism and productivity of our businesses and workers of course, but we should not discount the role of all those working in the space beyond the market and the state for a better and more rewarding life for us all. In the design of the recovery we have a chance not only to repay the debt we owe to this vital sector for how it helped during the crisis, but to raise it up to its proper place in our lives. It’s one we must take.

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The parallel pandemics: who will pay the societal costs of coronavirus misinformation? Imran Ahmed

Coronavirus has unleashed two parallel pandemics. One is the biological pandemic which is putting our National Health Service under such strain. The second is a social pandemic of digital misinformation – fake news and conspiracy theories that don’t just militate against our success in containing coronavirus but fundamentally threaten to weaken the liberal democratic values that underpin our society.

Both pandemics were, in fact, predictable. They are acute eruptions of chronic problems: the first of coronaviruses, variants of which caused SARS and MERS; the second of globalised, digitally-transmitted misinformation, which has exacerbated social maladies in recent years. We can count the long-term cost of digitally-enabled divisiveness in political instability, illiberal democratic politics, vaccine hesitancy, climate denial and rising identity-based hate worldwide.

The digital infrastructure which pumps out misinformation has been long in the making, but one thing we know about the bots and the trolls is they pivot fast to new issues. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) exists to research and disrupt digital hate and misinformation and we switched our focus entirely to misinformation relating to coronavirus two months ago when we saw the actors and spaces we track had opportunistically done the same.

Our findings so far are deeply alarming. Research by Dr Daniel Allington of King’s College London suggests that people who fall for coronavirus misinformation, even seemingly innocuous conspiracies about 5G technology, are less likely to follow clinical guidance such as washing their hands frequently, physically distancing and remaining at home wherever possible. The team at CCDH have found Facebook groups amassing hundreds of thousands of members, and YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, awash with fake “cures” and conspiracy theories about everything from 5G to theories about Jews, Muslims or the Chinese having planned this.

Just like coronavirus itself, the misinformation pandemic respects no geographical boundaries. In the past month we’ve seen cell towers – including those serving hospitals – set alight in Britain, groups breaking official guidance to hold anti-lockdown protests in North America, and harassment, violence and boycotts targeting Muslims in India.

Over the past two months, we have seen hate actors seeking to racialise coronavirus, blaming marginalised ‘out groups’ and minorities for spreading the virus by not complying with the government’s guidance. In a development only possible in the digital age, the UK far-right has adopted the tactics and even the hashtags of Indian Prime Minister Modi’s BJP party, using outdated images of Muslims gathering in public places to separate them from the collective efforts of society to overcome the virus. In an effort to exploit the increased solidarity felt across Britain’s population, perhaps best expressed by the weekly applause for NHS and care workers, we noted seemingly disconnected actors tweeting simultaneously (including bot activity) demanding money raised by Comic Relief for overseas aid be diverted to the NHS instead.

Undermining science

We also find economically-motivated actors employing populist tropes to cast doubt on the official medical guidance, in order to sell false “cures” and ineffective methods of supposedly immunising from the disease. Online forums in which people are given false confidence that they can protect themselves from the virus as long as they take vitamin C or other “alternative” supplements number millions in membership.

Additionally, fringe political actors and conspiracy theorists spread dangerous claims about the virus’ origin, claiming a motive lies behind the pandemic or questioning its existence at all. As Josie Cluer charts in her essay, the effects of these claims are felt well beyond the fringes of the internet – they

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 35 undermine trust in advice of both the government and the scientific establishment, as well as in the institutions themselves.

All of this has been undertaken with the tacit consent of the large social media platforms which have been slow to act to prevent their platforms being exploited for these ends, even explicitly refusing to remove dangerous or harmful content, in the case of anti-vaccine propaganda for example. Silicon Valley’s stubbornness is nothing new, but even seasoned tech-for-good advocates have been shocked at its continuation in the face of a global pandemic.

Governments have tended not to demand social media companies remove conspiracy theories and medical misinformation from their publishing platforms. The lack of state action does not obviate but rather intensifies the moral duty on social media companies to do their bit to beat this pandemic, a duty most of us shoulder every day. Indeed, YouTube have, through their limited actions and comments, recognised the harm conspiracism and hate cause and their ability to intervene, but tend not to take decisive action to stop violators using their platforms. This is a familiar pattern of acting in a limited way to avert negative PR, but rarely showing the will to act meaningfully and decisively remove sources of misinformation and hate.

Facebook, among others, has sought to promote and fund “fact-checking” services, claiming that the way to defeat “bad information” is with “good information”. But psychological research on the effectiveness of fact checking in health misinformation is mixed at best. Whereas fact checking can inoculate people against misinformation and conspiracy theories, it is far less effective in disabusing people of misinformation they already believe. There is evidence to suggest it can even lead to hardening of opinions. What is uncontested, however, is that people cannot believe a conspiracy theory they haven’t heard. The most effective way to reduce the transmission rate of misinformation is to take the megaphone away.

The lockdown and social distancing guidelines mean that people are isolated, often alone, spending more time online, and they are hungry for information about the coronavirus. Further, we know from psychological academic research that public health crises trigger our sanctity moral foundation, which is linked to authoritarianism. There is a risk that with these conditions, in addition to narratives offered across social media by the opportunistic actors outlined above, we could see large numbers of the people radicalised to adopting quite extremist views. Since the outbreak the CCDH has found evidence of social media users, who are looking to find and share information about coronavirus, being funnelled into darker digital spaces with more and more extremist content, in very short spaces of time. The conditions also appear to be particularly conducive to an upsurge in aversion to out-groups and anti-migration sentiments.

It is also possible that we are left with far larger audiences for digitally savvy misinformation peddlers and hate actors. Those whose message is particularly flexible already appear to have been successful in this end. David Icke is adept at applying his “superconspiracy” to world events – from 9/11 to the 2008 financial crash – and saw his social media following grow by 300,000 since the outbreak of coronavirus until he was recently ‘deplatformed’ by Facebook and YouTube following action by anti-hate groups including CCDH and prominent medical celebrities.

The undermining of trust in medical guidance and the scientific establishment we see from populist politicians, economically-motivated actors pushing their own “remedies,” and conspiracy theorists, could result in an increase in vaccine hesitancy, both threatening the success of any future vaccine to inoculate against coronavirus and worsening some countries’ already-falling immunisation rates. Anti-vaccine Facebook groups, Instagram accounts and YouTube channels count their audiences in the millions, and social media platforms have made it clear that they will not remove this form of medical misinformation, which Mark Zuckerberg has argued is legitimate “free expression.”

Freedom of speech ≠ freedom of reach

The impact of the pandemic on the future for social media is less clear. Legislation to introduce clearer regulation is on the horizon for the British & French governments and in the EU, the US, and elsewhere. Social media companies’ inaction against hate, misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories, even

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 36 in the face of a global pandemic that has already killed hundreds of thousands, is shocking even to those already well acquainted with their unwillingness to act. The immorality of refusing to do all they can to put a halt to the social pandemic of misinformation is laying the ground for harsher regulation than may otherwise have been forthcoming. If the platforms do not shift their policies and begin demonstrating greater willingness to act against producers of harmful content, it is likely to cost them in the aftermath of coronavirus.

This is why CCDH advocated the UK Online Forums Bill 2019, which would have made administrators of social media groups vicariously liable for any illegal content if they refuse to remove that content and a reasonable person would conclude they had failed to act appropriately when notified. This would change the culture of groups, encouraging active moderation and creating real consequences for those who knowingly set up groups in which illegal activity such as harassment, incitement of hate that crosses the criminal threshold or the planning of criminal enterprises including identity-based violence takes place. This does not infringe on freedom of speech or the protections that social media platforms currently enjoy under US law, designating them as platforms rather than publishers. Creative legislation can fill the gap until a proper regulator can be put into place to ensure that online spaces are treated the same as other publishers and held accountable for their content.

More fundamentally, there will need to be a rethink of the way social media giants are treated in the tax system. At the moment, these companies have enormous influence on our society, profit greatly from our economy, and yet do not pay their fair share. This must change.

Future taxation of social media companies should rest on two pillars: parity with the offline economy and compensation for harm.

The first priority is to ensure that they pay their taxes. At the moment, social media companies are able to use a web of complex offshore arrangements to avoid paying taxes in the UK. This should change. The government has already indicated it is willing to create a digital services tax to target these companies after reports that firms like Facebook paid just £28m in UK taxes despite making £1.6bn in UK sales in 2019. That digital services tax, which the government has mooted might be 2% of revenues, should close the gap much further so they are contributing back an equivalent proportion to that paid by most other UK businesses. This would remove the advantage they have in moving around the world, finding the lowest tax jurisdictions from which to claim to operate.

The second is that a hypothecated levy should be created to ensure they pay for the social problems they create. This would act as a means to encourage them to act to avert the clear negative consequences of their activities, for example, the damage they do to community cohesion, the cost of policing the spaces they allow to be colonised with hate actors and criminals, and the cost of dealing with the public health risks they introduce through promoting health misinformation in their newsfeeds.

Taken together, these have a chance of finally socialising social media, and bringing them into the family of responsible economic actors that take part in our economy. These firms are here today, gone tomorrow; such are the dynamics of online business cycles. While active and on the up, they grab for every dollar with a desperation borne of their own awareness that they cannot last forever – these disruptors will be disrupted themselves one day, and they know it. But there is a future in which they could become established and responsible parts of our society, harnessing technology to social purpose and building companies of enduring value. That future has always been there waiting to be built – perhaps it is the double pandemic of biological contagion and viral fake news that will finally give us the spur we need.

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Section Two: Our economy

Our economy

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Plucking the goose: how do we ensure we tax and spend fairly in the recovery? Kitty Ussher

It’s much easier to pay off debt when you have some money coming in. This is the key to understanding the Treasury’s initial strategy at the start of the lockdown: their overriding aim was to prevent temporary disruption from becoming permanent. That way, they hoped, when the health threat passes, the economy would have the best chance of bouncing back pretty much intact, complete with its ability to generate tax revenues to flow into the national coffers.

So allowing businesses to furlough staff on 80 per cent pay was not, as some thought, a type of compensation for the inconvenience of lockdown, nor a concession to the idea of a universal basic income, but rather a mechanism to mothball a company with all its contracts still in place so that it could be started up again – preserving jobs and making nice taxable profits – as easily as possible when conditions allowed.

Seen through this prism, the initial reluctance to extend furlough to the self-employed makes more sense. The cost of that concession, which eventually became politically essential to ensure parliament would pass the required emergency legislation before Easter, is of the same magnitude as the entire emergency cash boost to the NHS and is going to people who wouldn’t have had any contractual barriers to going back to work as soon as their clients wanted them. A similar motivation drove the prohibition on furloughed employees from engaging in new work for someone else (unless already permitted under their original contract) – legally, for them, nothing is supposed to have changed.

However, the world around is changing, and rapidly so. Different groups of people have had hugely differing experiences of the crisis, and this will inform how government policy evolves. As a starting point, all of this has, of course, cost money: the Office of Budget Responsibility’s “baseline estimate” suggests around £42bn on furlough, £10bn each for the NHS and the self-employed schemes, around £30bn in help for small businesses and a huge welfare bill as well 1.5 million additional applications are received for universal credit.

These costs are being paid just as revenues into government are falling. Businesses which find their markets have shrunk will have less profits to pay corporation tax, individuals who lose their jobs will no longer be paying income tax, and lower economic activity means less VAT and fuel duty too. Overall, the best estimate we have so far is that revenues will be £130bn lower this year than the figures Mr. Sunak presented to parliament in his Budget on March 11th.

Put all this together, and the OBR suggests that even in five years time, government debt will be £260bn higher than was expected in mid-March and as a proportion of GDP around 10 per cent higher (85%) than previously forecast (75%). The only thing that is sure is that the damage would have been worse if the government had not done anything at all.

Whose bill?

All of which begs the painful and profoundly political question of who is paying the bill for all this. With a fair headwind and a period of stability, one option is to do nothing. If the OBR’s baseline assumptions hold true, the fall in output in March-June will be reversed by the end of the year, meaning that those high levels of government debt will start to return to a slow downward path next year without any further policy changes, as the economy recovers allowing the coffers automatically to start to refill and debts slowly to be paid.

This may be attractive to a government under strain, ever-conscious of the need to maintain public consent for their actions. But there are reasons for doing more. For a start, the current forecasts are highly uncertain and debt levels before the pandemic were still way above what used to be considered prudent: faster action to reduce borrowing is simply sensible. But also, as Louis XIV’s finance minister,

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Jean-Baptiste Colbert, is reported to have said “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to extract the greatest amount of feathers with the minimum amount of hissing”. The question that the Treasury will be pondering over the summer is whether today’s goose – the great British public – will hiss differently as a result of its experience of this pandemic.

If the boundary of what is politically possible in terms of taxation has indeed shifted, then that presents two opportunities for government. The immediate one is that of prudence. It is better policy to bolster depleted resources when it is possible to do so. The second, more longer-term, is to use taxation policy to re-engineer Britain’s economic machine, and rebalance between different groups of society, to better fit our new post-pandemic priorities.

A starting point is to consider who, amongst the population, now enjoys such widespread support that it would be impossible to raise their taxes. Lewis Atkinson’s essay touches on the redistribution of esteem towards front-line NHS and other public sector workers but these are joined by low income workers in the food, retail and distribution sectors. They all now have a special status. If they were bankers in a good year, they would receive bonuses; perhaps any emergency budget in the autumn should think about a government equivalent.

Consider the sharp distinction, however, between this group who have never worked harder and furloughed workers who are paid while actively prevented from working. Of course, being furloughed is not without anxiety – job insecurity, overcrowding, home-schooling – but when seen through the eyes of a public sector shift worker it looks like they’ve had an easier few months.

Then compare both groups with the better-off office workers, the zoom conferencers, with their gardens, home offices, and bank accounts that may well be strengthening as the cost of commuting is saved and the cumulatively expensive temptations of sandwiches, lunch-break shopping, and the quick after-work drink are removed. The goose may not hiss much if this group is called on to do their bit by making a greater financial contribution.

Writing in 1940, the economist John Maynard Keynes, proposed a system for financing the Second World War that forced people to surrender some of their income temporarily through a system of “deferred pay”, a type of enforced saving, repaid with interest at a later date. It was designed to reduce demand in the economy allowing greater industrial resources to be available for the production of munitions, and lending to the government in the process. The forced saving that many find themselves undertaking at the moment is different – forced by circumstance rather than design – but the Treasury may find it expedient to draw a parallel between the two to justify government action.

The Conservative manifesto promised not to raise the rate of income tax, VAT or national insurance. However, this could be the moment to abolish the tax-free personal allowance on savings income. While the immediate benefits to the Treasury will be dented by interest rates being at their lowest ever rate, this presumably will not always be the case. And, with the government’s own debt servicing costs rising as interest rates rise, it is an attractive prospect for the Treasury to have a revenue stream that automatically rises at the same time. Reintroducing a tax on savings income would also send an important signal that spending is preferred over saving as the economy gets going again. And the amounts are not insignificant: when the relief was introduced in 2016, it was expected to cost the Treasury around a billion pounds annually.

A new tax-and-spend settlement

Thinking longer term, the government will also want to consider how to raise revenue while simultaneously using tax policy to re-engineer the economy in the way we now realise we want to see. Green taxation is one contender: with the government now controlling the railways and airlines on their knees we could make a policy choice to subsidise the former by taxing the latter. That way, as we start to move around the country again, it becomes a simple economic choice to prefer rail to air.

Similarly, with our domestic car industry struggling, now might be the time to accelerate the transition to clean vehicles through, for example, hiking tax on those old models that have been sitting unused on drives and kerbsides whilst at the same time – in a variant of a policy introduced following the 2008-09

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 40 recession – subsidising scrappage schemes that pay out in vouchers towards new UK-built electric vehicles.

Moreover, now that we’ve got more of a taste for supporting local independent shops, a necessity when online delivery slots were hard to come by, it might be the time for a tax on food miles, so that items that have travelled the furthest to reach you become more expensive. This would support local producers, bolster community links, make mass-produced snacks less attractive, encourage local micro farming initiatives and, with shorter supply chains, benefit the environment as well.

In the labour market, those with the lowest skills will, as always, be most at risk of unemployment when the economy is weak. With a large proportion of those furloughed likely to be in the low-paid retail, entertainment and hospitality sectors, it seems unusual that they are not permitted to use this time to engage in a side hustle if the opportunity presents itself. Even with the government’s support, some businesses will, unfortunately, go under in the months ahead. Facing that uncertainty, their current furloughed employees should not be prevented from raising their incomes through other work because of a standard contract term that was not written with this scenario in mind.

An interesting question arises as to whether furloughed workers – who effectively are on the government payroll – can be directed or encouraged to engage in government priorities. Thought is already being given to whether they should be encouraged to form part of the new land army of seasonal farm workers over the summer months, thereby helping our agricultural sector transition to the post-Brexit world less reliant on migrant workers. This idea could be extended, for example to support the roll-out of virus testing centres or create a new army of teaching assistants to support children who have fallen behind as the full horror of the attainment gap between rich and poor becomes apparent when schools return.

In 17th century France, the skill with which Jean-Baptiste Colbert managed to extract feathers from his proverbial goose led to a more efficient and progressive method of taxation and provided finance for Louis XIV to pursue his expansionary wars. Our current battle may be more existential but many of the lessons are the same.

Kitty Ussher is the Chief Economic Advisor at Demos and formerly Economic Secretary to the Treasury. @KittyUssher

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Whither welfare: building a stronger safety net for us all after the crisis. Ashwin Kumar

It is difficult to overstate the radicalism of Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Job Retention Scheme. Under pressure of a once-in-a-century health emergency, the UK has become continental. We have abandoned our traditional approach of bare minimum support for people out of work to a Bismarkian approach more commonly seen in other parts of Europe.

Employees who might otherwise have been laid off can get 80% of their previous earnings, up to £2,500 a month – a level of state generosity that’s largely unheard of here in the UK. Previously, losing work would have meant going down to £74 a week for a single person, or £117 for a couple. Instead, up to a cap, government support will be in proportion to previous earnings.

This provision makes the UK, for a period, more similar to many other European countries. For example, in Germany, benefit rates for people who lose their job but have paid sufficient social insurance contributions are 60% of previous earnings, or 67% for those with children. This can be received for between 6 and 24 months, depending on length of contributions and age.

The principle behind such schemes is one of insurance to allow living standards to be maintained. Contributions pay for the scheme and, when job losses occur, most of the risk is borne by the state rather than the individual.

In contrast, the objective in the UK is not insurance, but preventing destitution. The £74/£117 a week will only provide for basic necessities and represents a very large cut in income for most workers. The UK approach is that most of the risk of loss of work is borne by the individual.

th This approach is not new. When the modern National Insurance system started on the 5 of July 1948, unemployment benefit, which depended on contributions, was set at £1.30 a week. This was only just above National Assistance, the payment designed to prevent destitution for those without sufficient contributions, at £1.20.

There is one part of the social security system that does maintain living standards, although briefly: Statutory Maternity Pay provides 90% of previous earnings, but only for 6 weeks. After that, weekly payments are capped at £151. For people off sick from work, the state’s provision is £96 a week.

So the pre-coronavirus picture of social security in the UK is one of subsistence-level flat-rate payments for the unemployed (£74), and slightly higher for those off sick from work (£96). For maternity, there is maintenance of living standards for six weeks, and then a much lower cap after that, although still much higher than unemployment benefits.

A reasonable question to ask is why these differences exist. Rishi Sunak faced up to exactly that question a few weeks ago and, for a year, has put the standard amount of Universal Credit up from £74 a week to £94, broadly matching Statutory Sick Pay.

Of these two acts of generosity – paying 80% of wages under the Job Retention Scheme and pushing up the basic minimum in Universal Credit by £20 a week – the former is the most radical. Not only is it a departure from several decades of UK history, but is also by far the more generous.

Whose safety net?

Where does this new generosity come from? Why is the state not restricting all support to pre-existing benefit levels of £74 or £117 a week? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the government actually wants people to stop working to reduce the spread of the virus, and many of the people affected wouldn’t accept such levels of income.

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We can only imagine how much lower compliance with stay-at-home instructions might have been if £74 or £117 a week was the limit of what was on offer. But of course, people unable to work at other times have had to survive on these amounts. So something has changed.

Usually the implicit message from the public that the government appears to respond to is ‘keep benefits low to stop those people over there living the life of Riley at our expense’. Today, the perceived message is 'we're in trouble – help us'.

The crucial question is whether the people needing help are ‘them’ or ‘us’. Are those who need help because they’re out of work like ‘us’ – the hard-working majority – or do they represent a different tribe who can be labelled as feckless and not trying hard enough?

In normal times, the feeling that those who need help are different is bolstered by a picture of poverty presented by some as being a problem of so-called troubled families, or caused by addiction, or ‘family breakdown’. If the causes of poverty are ‘extreme’ or ‘abnormal’ in this way, then those who need help can’t be like us. Similarly, the notion is that those who’ve lost their job have in some way failed to meet the standards of hard-working Britain.

As the Resolution Foundation has shown those on the lowest earnings are much more likely to be working in sectors now shut down due to the coronavirus. Yet, to some degree, the ‘them and us’ rhetoric has broken down as everyone faces visible disruption of one kind or another. This has turned the benefit calculation on its head: the question now is what do people feel they need, not how little can they survive on.

What follows from this sense of identity or empathy with the economic victims of this crisis is a lack of moral criticism: those suffering economically in today’s crisis are not to blame for their plight. There is no fecklessness involved in working for a sector whom the government has ordered shut. How can a worker be culpable if their company has no customers right now?

If all of our work lives are affected by this crisis, we understand the forces that have caused some to lose work. Thus, we consent to our taxes being used to maintain the living standards of the newly workless at far more generous levels than in the past.

If this is part of the story behind our new acceptance of more generous benefit levels, does it mean the opposite was true in the past? Prior to this year, did we experience little sense of shared identity with the steelworkers of Redcar as the steel works closed? Did we feel no empathy for retail workers when it seemed that, each week, another firm was going to the wall? And when company mergers took place and the inevitable cost-savings lead to redundancies, did we feel, even if we didn’t say it, that some sense of blame was attached to those who lost their jobs?

If not, how else could we justify benefit levels that, when economic need came closer to our door, we could not accept for ourselves?

This is not an easy question to answer, but it is worth reflecting on the reality of unemployment. In December 2019 to February 2020, 62% of the 1.4 million people unemployed had been out of work for no more than 6 months. The majority of people who are unemployed don’t stay unemployed for long: most people who lose their job are trying to get a new one and succeed.

Economists say there are three types of unemployment: frictional, cyclical and structural. Frictional unemployment is the normal process of people losing their jobs and finding new ones due to the warp and weft of companies expanding and contracting, of some businesses shutting and new ones opening. Cyclical unemployment happens during economic downturns. There’s less economic activity so fewer people and businesses want to buy goods or services, and job losses follow. Structural unemployment is what we’re seeing in retail right now: sectors of the economy going through longer-term decline displacing workers as firms merge and fold.

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So there are some people who, in a normally functioning economy, lose and gain jobs as companies contract and grow. We also see the economic cycle go through ups and downs. In the downturns, shorter order books means fewer jobs and a period out of work until demand recovers. Finally, across the economy, long-term structural change affects different industries at different times. In the 1980s, manufacturing and coal mining experienced structural decline whereas today it is retail.

What unites all of these causes of unemployment is that, whichever we are talking about, it makes no more sense to attach blame to people who lose their jobs in those circumstances than it does when the underlying cause is a global pandemic.

The other social distancing

However much logic suggests that blame for being unemployed was no more deserved before the pandemic than now, that is not the way the public thought. The British Social Attitudes Survey shows that 2010 was a high point for the view that cutting benefits would mean that people would learn to stand on their own two feet.

In that year, unemployment was at a fourteen-year high because of the most severe recession for decades. So when, conceivably, the least possible blame could be attached to people being out of work, the public was more convinced than at any other time that cutting benefits was what was needed.

What this shows is that our pre-coronavirus attitude was close to ‘blame the unemployed’ and ‘persuade them to change their ways by only providing subsistence-level benefits’. But this depended on another form of social distancing to the one we are experiencing now, one in which we distanced ourselves from the idea of unemployment and assumed it happened to someone else who, let’s face it, surely must bear some blame for their situation.

Roger Harding’s essay touches on how this pandemic has brought economic crisis much closer to all of our doors (even if, in reality, the low-paid are much more likely to have it cross their threshold). This proximity has changed the blame game. Now, we are conscious of our common risks, and want the protection of a pay-out from an insurance policy for which we never bothered to pay the premiums.

So what is the prescription for the future? Does it mean we should keep in place unemployment insurance with 80% replacement ratios for the first few months after losing a job? Such provision cannot be a free lunch and would have to be paid for through higher national insurance contributions.

The time is now for just such a conversation. More importantly, this period of ‘new Bismarkianism’ gives us the opportunity to end the ‘them and us’ of the welfare debate and move to a national conversation with more empathy and less division.

This crisis won’t last forever. At some point, the lockdown will end, business order books will refill, and our shops will hum with activity. The question for us all is, whether, at that point, our welfare blame game will restart too.

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We haven’t had enough of experts: how do we honour the contribution of universities and scientists? Josie Cluer

“People in this country have had enough of experts”.

Michael Gove famously said in the run up to the Brexit Referendum. This soundbite captured a fundamental challenge in our democracy, about who should trust whom, and why, and who should have the power to make changes to people’s lives. It gave voice to a growing perception that ‘self-appointed’ experts thought they knew better than the rest of the country, but actually they didn’t.

The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated the magnificence of the science, research and expertise in the UK which for too long has been overlooked. Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty have become poster-boys for a lifetime of toiling in labs to understand the world better, for statistical analysis as a route to social progress, and for balance, reason and careful judgement.

So this crisis has given us an opportunity to reassert that expertise is a good thing and to make the case that Britain should seek to strengthen its expertise economy. To do that, we have two tasks. First, to make the case for experts and the value of expertise, reframing its value as moving society forward, not just something that’s good for the economy. Second, to preserve but reform the institutions – primarily universities – that underpin it.

What do we mean by expertise?

“Expertise” is the idea that by virtue of better education, research, dedication, experience and/or ability, a person or people should be granted more influence or authority over other people’s lives whether by the people’s choice or otherwise. For example, if you were having a brain tumour removed, you’d want to be treated by an expert – someone who had studied how to remove brain tumours, benefited from years of painstaking research into the field, and had a good track record of doing them herself. Similarly in public life, the Governor of the Bank of England is a well-respected economist; the President of the supreme court is an eminent lawyer; the Chief Inspector of Ofsted is a top notch educationalist.

The UK has a huge infrastructure that underpins such expertise. Our university system is world-leading, with four universities in the global top ten, developing mind bogglingly cutting edge research from graphene to neuromorphic computing. This is thanks to sustained investment over the decades as well as the dedication of thousands of researchers, scientists and officials, people who beaver away in search of facts or ideas to solve the world’s problems.

Why, then, has the very concept of expertise had a rough ride over the last ten years? Michael Gove didn’t create the issue, he merely named it.

First, it is becoming more common not to listen to “them” – something that goes beyond a healthy disrespect for authority. Driven by crises in politics, banking, journalism, this scepticism affects everyone with power, whether gained democratically or by virtue of expertise. It is particularly apparent in attitudes towards health: witness “anti vaxxers” who won’t vaccinate their children because of repeatedly scientifically disproven theories. There has been a rise in “alternative therapies” for which there is no (or worse, negative) evidence, homeopathy being chief amongst them. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop enterprise is all the more pernicious for using celebrity to promote it. And the heckler who told the renowned economist Anon Memond that “that’s your bloody GDP. It’s not ours” shows the disconnect between people and the so-called experts.

Second, the advent of “fake news” means that people don’t trust what they read in the papers or online; 52% of people worry that the media they consume contains untrustworthy information. This makes the

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 45 job of communicating information and facts to the general public – who increasingly get their news on social media – more challenging.

Third, there is a polarisation in national debate and discourse. In our increasingly quick-fix, celebrity-idolising, shouty culture, the idea of listening to quiet, bespectacled people who spend their lives painstakingly reviewing papers and rigorously analysing data seems discordant. Gwyneth Paltrow is more easily accessible than the guy who wrote “Modelling the impact on virus transmission of Wolbachia-mediated blocking of dengue virus infection of Aedes aegypti”. But that doesn’t make her more right. Further, an interviewee who says she might not know the answer or might have changed her mind (based on further evidence) or who qualifies her judgements does not often make for blockbuster TV.

Expertise is back in fashion

Coronavirus has potentially changed the game in two ways. First, similar to the response to counter terrorism after 9/11 and 7/7, the pandemic has reminded us to value something we took for granted previously: science, expertise and fact. The pandemic has reminded us of the wonderful science being done in the UK. The scientists, medics and experts have brought the role of scientists back to public consciousness.

Many scientists, researchers and officials – like many others across the UK – are contributing hugely to the national effort. They are working long hours, leaving their loved ones to work in labs, and dedicating themselves to modelling, experimenting, testing, analysing and thinking. The pandemic has also revealed that these people, and their underpinning support – the labs, the existing evidence base, the journals that publish them, the universities, the charities, the funders – are part of our critical national infrastructure. Without them, or with weaker ones, we simply wouldn't be able to respond to a pandemic. We owe them a debt of gratitude.

Second, coronavirus has changed the game for universities. Their sector body, Universities UK, argues the sector will lose £800m this year, and up to £7bn in international student fees next year. There are already warnings that universities will go bankrupt and the Vice Chancellor of Manchester has warned of a £270m funding gap with associated job losses. All this has simply exposed what sector observers already knew: the funding model for universities, which makes up for underfunding research by cross-subsidising it via fees (often from international students, often from humanities based subjects), is utterly unsustainable.

And it compounds challenges which universities already faced: reductions in research funding following the UK’s exit from the EU, increased competition for international students and top talent from overseas (made worse by Brexit), student pressure over the value of money of a degree for which they now pay £29k and pay off at an interest rate up to three times a mortgage, and, competition from alternative providers and delivery models.

Winning the argument for the expertise economy

To secure a society in which expertise is valued and supported, we must act on multiple levels: first to win the public argument for expertise, science and scientific progress. Once that argument is secure we can get into the detail of how to protect the infrastructure that supports it.

The argument for the expertise economy in recent years has been financial. I’ve argued elsewhere, there was a political consensus that the “race to the top” (Gordon Brown) and the “global race” (George Osborne) are best supported by investment in science and innovation. They are good, rational arguments, but they speak to policy wonks who like growing GDP, productivity, and higher-level skills.

The pandemic gives us an opportunity to reframe the argument for experts. Universities and the wider “expert” community should make the case that scientific research, analysis, evidence and expertise are essential to keeping us safe and healthy and society functioning as we want it. Without it, we can’t figure out how to respond to pandemics, invent apps to deliver food to our grans, find a cure for disease

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(coronavirus or cancer) or train the doctors, nurses and data analysts of the future. The more expertise we have, the better decisions we are likely to make, whether individually or collectively, in all spheres of life.

We should go further and appeal to a very human desire to push the boundaries of knowledge: to go a bit further than anyone has ever gone before. For those who have an expansive, outward looking political view, the better our research and expertise, the more we can collaborate to solve world problems of the sort George Graham touches on in his piece. For those who have a more closed view, the more we exit global institutions, the more important having our own research and expertise becomes.

A note of caution. We must protect the role of science. It is no wonder the daily press conference often sees politicians flanked by the chief medical officer and/or the chief scientific adviser: polling by Ipsos shows that public trust in both medics and scientists presently far exceeds that of politicians.

However, the narrative about “following the science” is misleading: the big decisions are unquestionably political. How do we balance deaths vs the economy? How do we balance the needs of different age groups? How do we protect frontline workers vs others? These are unenviable decisions to have to make, and the only people who should make them are those who are democratically elected. As Chris Tyler argues in the Conversation, the science informs the policy, not the other way around.

Donald Trump’s forays into science caricature why politicians shouldn’t influence it, and the outrage over Dominic Cummings’ attendance at SAGE shows that (perceived) political interference into scientific and / or technical information has the potential to damage the reputation of the experts as well as the politicians. This process must be transparent and clear.

Perhaps more importantly, scientists must better explain the scientific process. Concepts like “good evidence”, uncertainty and risk should be better understood. In an increasingly polarised world, we must fight harder for the right to take careful judgements, ask for more evidence, and admit uncertainty.

Reforming the engine of the expertise economy: university policy

As I’ve argued above, universities are under serious pressure. The Government should bail them out. But, as Andy Westwood argues on WonkHE, it should do so in a way that accelerates the future of the sector it wants to see. The problem is that the government currently doesn’t have a view of its ambition for the future of the sector. Policy for universities is split between two departments. The Department for Education sees universities as “big school” which means it is focused on admissions into elite universities (as ever), the value for money of a university degree, and freedom of speech. BEIS technically has shared responsibility but has less policy activity. Regulation and funding are fragmented.

Instead, we need a coherent, singular strategy for universities that sees them support our wider societal goals. First, they must deliver the research, innovation and science to push the limits of our knowledge, and use this to contribute to both public debate and our economy. Second, they must teach people (of all ages, in different kinds of ways), to further their skills and enable them to live the lives they want to. Third, they must support the levelling up agenda, driving economic growth and their local economies.

But not every institution must do all three, and nor all in the same ways. The government must create the incentives in the funding mechanisms to enable (indeed, encourage) different types of institutions to thrive in different ways without the complex cross subsidies. This will inevitably mean some tough choices for individual institutions: some courses must stop, some research must stop, some institutions must close or merge.

Experts have been much maligned in recent years. But the pandemic has revealed their worth. We repay them by making the case for valuing expertise, and pushing a policy agenda to protect through reform of the institutions that underpin it.

Josie Cluer is a partner at EY, leading work on learning, education and skills, having previously worked in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. @josie_cluer

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What’s working better: how do we ensure good work for all after coronavirus? Andrew Pakes

The coronavirus has changed the way we live and work. Since March, the economy has been turned inside out with large numbers of us working from home, whole industries closed for business and commonly-held perceptions of value inverted. The pandemic is both a health emergency and an economic crisis.

Work matters because for most of us it is how we earn a living, feed ourselves and look after our families. While talk of the economy may seem at odds with the rising human cost of the crisis, the economy is about something bigger than shareholder value or the tax avoidance policies of wealthy individuals. There is a growing realisation that health and the economy do not exist in isolation but are deeply intertwined.

The crisis has revealed many of the limits of a UK labour market previously lauded as agile and responsive. It has shown that too many jobs are built on foundations that are insecure and precarious. And that previously unthinkable policy solutions, such as the state supporting the wages of workers, are possible and can be implemented overnight.

In many ways, despite social distancing, the crisis has reminded us how much we do in fact rely on each other. Value is now about compassion rather than company share price. Key workers aren’t CEOs or the C-suite but nurses, carers, scientists, shop workers and delivery people. Our ability to stay safe and healthy relies on the work of others.

The cracks in our foundations

Throughout the crisis, scrutiny of business behaviour has been high. In many ways, we are all in this together. Many businesses have been at the forefront of supporting their workers and customers in the community. The response of the Co-operative and other leading supermarkets working directly with food banks is a good example. Many of the employers that we work with in Prospect have gone beyond government guidance to provide pay and support greater than that provided by HMRC.

Yet, in other ways, the crisis has shone a light on some of the worst practices that underpin our current economic model: for example, those companies paying out huge dividends to shareholders while asking the taxpayer for bailouts to fill the holes in their balance sheet, or others refusing to take advantage of government support and abandoning their employees to the tender mercies of the benefits system. The reliance of many businesses and industries on the willingness of self-employed workers to shoulder huge financial risks has also been dramatically demonstrated, as has the underlying lack of resilience in companies working to a ‘just in time’ model with zero slack in the system.,

The crisis has also brought into sharp relief new and emerging challenges at work, such as the rapid increase in worker surveillance technology to check up on people working from home and the crossover between government and big tech in the use of our data to develop contact tracing apps.

These issues will persist beyond the immediate crisis. Economists suggest that the lockdown will cause the deepest recession in a century. The OBR has said the economy could shrink by 13 per cent this year. The recovery will not be the end of the bad news for many people with an increase in unemployment, falling wages and greater concerns about family incomes and job security. As Kitty Ussher’s essay charts, these burdens will fall hardest on those already experiencing the hard edge of our economic model. It’s going to be a grim few years for the low-paid, gig workers, and for many young and BAME workers.

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The five big questions

If lockdown has shown up inequalities in our labour market, it also points to a way forward to resolve them. The speed with which the government implemented its income protection schemes and provided funding to protect jobs shows that political change can happen. The growth in community aid schemes, local support for food banks, and regular support for carers and NHS workers, shows the kind of country we really are and the communities that we want to live and work in.

We need to build on these foundations to create a more embracing vision about the future, where workers fit into it, and what this means for a shared story of good work. The post-crisis response must not be left to individual gestures, it must be a collective decision to do things differently. Here I suggest the five big questions we need to be thinking about as we prepare for the future:

● How do we value jobs? First, we need to reward key workers. Coronavirus has forced our society to rapidly reassess the value of work. Whether that is nurses caring for the sick or retail workers helping to keep us fed, the usual perceptions of valuable work have been turned upside down. The challenge now is to convert this moment of clarity into action to reverse the priorities of recent years and forge a new framework that reflects this. Social care and care workers are underfunded. Too many delivery and platform workers are facing precarious conditions with little security. There is an opportunity to talk about value on a scale we have not seen in recent years. What does a Living Wage really mean? Shouldn’t work ensure security and the ability to house, feed and look after yourself?

● What do we mean by good work? The way we work has been transformed during the crisis with home working, flexible hours and the daily juggle between work and childcare. It is unlikely all of these changes will be reversed. But just as technology has made this possible for many workers, others have been left behind. Existing inequalities have been exacerbated by the lockdown. We are now thinking more about mental health and well-being than ever before. It is not just about the nature of jobs people do, it is also about how they are treated at work and beyond. Matthew Taylor has written about the kind of changes we need post-crisis. But the stark reality is recent years have taught many workers to be sceptical of the idea that change, driven by technology or other factors, will be inclusive and positive. Prospect commissioned research from YouGov last year which showed 58 per cent of workers thought they would not be consulted about any technology changes being introduced at work. We don’t just need an analysis of what is wrong with the economy, we also need to start thinking about what good jobs look like, where they are based, and how they are organised.

● How do we create an economic transition that lifts everyone up? Our economy was already changing before coronavirus due to advances in the application of new technology. This crisis has not paused the pace of change; it has accelerated it. Whole businesses have switched to home working in a matter of weeks thanks to the latest technology. And whilst much of the high street is under lockdown, the focus on online retail and delivery has increased. These structural changes are likely to deepen. The Resolution Foundation estimates that 11 million workers will be furloughed during lockdown. There have already been nearly two million additional Universal Credit claimants. Business will look to automation and how technology can speed its recovery accelerating which jobs and people will be winners and losers. What kind of economy emerges post-lockdown is also a question about how we manage transition in our economic model.

● How do we define our work in a world of rapidly changing technology? The crisis has also placed even more weight on the promise of new technology to transform how we deal with problems. Google, Apple and other tech players are working alongside app developers to create contact and tracing tools using mobile phone data that could help limit the spread of the disease, but there are challenges as laid out by Women Leading in AI among others. Some employers have reached for automated hiring and HR technology to speed up recruitment and to keep tabs on

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remote workers. Amazon, for instance, recently used data-driven technology to on-board 1,700 staff in a day. The rapid advance of digital technologies into workspaces mean employers are accumulating huge amounts of data on their workforces. For all the focus on individual data privacy, little attention has been paid to data rights at work and the fast-moving frontier of workplace technologies.

● How do we create a new social partnership? If it has felt like the government has spoken about trade unions more in recent weeks than in the last decade, that is because it is true. The recognition that we need all parts of society working together in this crisis begs the question of why we were not taking this joined-up approach beforehand. Unions in the UK have been vital in helping the government to design income support mechanisms and assisting employers to ride out the crisis, but all of this has happened from a standing start. Looking to those countries that responded quicker, like Germany and the Nordic countries, trade unions have long been part of the solution. If worker voice has been important to building trust in a crisis, it will be even more important in rebuilding our way of life post-crisis.

Making this a sustainable recovery

When we emerge from the coronavirus crisis we will still be faced with the climate emergency. When thinking about the economic and social structures we will build and rebuild in the coming months, reducing emissions must be absolutely central. This will need leadership from government, business and civil society, especially if the transition is to be achieved in a just way. Again we can learn from abroad: sixty of the largest Germany companies have already agreed to put climate at the heart of their agenda in recovering from the crisis. As Germany takes over the Presidency of the EU they will look to marry up the EU’s recovery plan with a new commitment to reduce emissions by 55% by 2030 on 1990 levels. The growing movement around the climate emergency has been a catalyst for debate around a green new deal. How do we ensure that momentum continues post-crisis?

The biggest challenge will be the desperation many will understandably feel to return to business as usual. As well as the emotional desire for a bit of normality, there are also powerful interests who benefited from the previous ways of doing things financially or politically. If the government wants to deliver for the left-behind people and places that voted it into office last December (albeit in a very different world), these vested interests are ones that they will need to take on. We will also need a concerted effort to counter the narrative that recovery from the crisis requires a strategy that focuses on economic growth and tax cuts for business to the exclusion of all else. It was this short-termism that has left us so unprepared for a crisis and it won’t be what guides us to a fair and sustainable future.

At the heart of our response must be the idea that we can build from today’s new interest in social capital to create a more compelling and shared story about our future, and where work fits into that.

It should not have taken a crisis for some to come to the realisation that we are all human and owe our successes and failures to the strength of the societies in which we live our lives. But these moments of genuine solidarity, of clapping for the NHS or volunteering to deliver food to elderly neighbours, must become more than the stories we tell ourselves about our national spirit. They must become hardwired into the mainframe of our state, our economy, and our culture. There is a chance, perhaps a generational chance, to put the brakes on some of the trends that just a few weeks ago seemed far beyond our control. It is a chance we have to take.

Andrew Pakes is Director of Research and Communications at Prospect and on the board of LGBT charity Stonewall. @Andrew4MK

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Section Three: Our public services

Our public services

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New age: what the pandemic tells us about what we’re getting wrong on social care and ageing. Sonia Sodha

One of the most damning signs of the ageism and disablism that runs through society is that our expectation of what it means for someone to live a fulfilling life drops dramatically as soon as they need help to carry out the everyday tasks like washing and dressing that come so easily to most of us. So it’s shocking, but not surprising, that the lives of older and disabled people seem to have been valued less in this pandemic.

As the number of community infections and hospital deaths is falling, infection and death rates in care homes are, at the time of writing, continuing to rise. Despite the idea of “shielding” older and vulnerable people from the disease being a core part of the government’s pandemic response, its lack of investment and focus on the social care sector means that those who rely on getting help with intimate tasks – whether they live in a care home, or get that help at home – end up exposed to greater risk than the rest of us, as care workers are forced to work without adequate protective equipment and care providers have gone for weeks without sufficient testing for residents and staff.

The dire situation facing people who rely on care services has created a general sense of “something must be done”. But as health and social care secretary Matt Hancock launches a badge for care workers – an initiative that will barely make a dent in the problems facing social care across most of the country – what are the concrete steps that must be taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?

We need more than applause

The social care crisis is often described as a problem of underfunding. After a decade of cuts, the King’s Fund report that government funding of social care is £300m a year lower than it was in 2010 and more people are requesting means-tested state support for care, but fewer people than ever are getting it. The heart-breaking result is that, according to Age Concern, an estimated 1.5 million older people – that’s one in seven of over 65s – go without the essential help they need with everyday tasks.

But the problems with the way we do older care do not stop at funding. There is a deeper issue, which is the way in which we conceive of care work. Caring is regarded as low skill work – and is low paid. Many homecare workers do not get paid for travel time between appointments and so don’t even end up making the minimum wage. Yet as anyone who’s ever observed a carer at work will know, care work is anything but low skill and is emotional as well as physical labour.

This is a direct result of societal ageism. Someone with Alzheimer’s is just as capable of experiencing joy as the rest of us; someone who needs help to wash and dress is no less capable of stimulating conversation. Yet care work is seen as being about managing someone’s physical and mental decline, rather than supporting people to live rich, fulfilling lives. And the way it is often commissioned and structured reduces it to a series of physical tasks, when the reality is that done well it is so much more. The psychoanalyst Isabel Menzies Lyth documented in the 1950s how hospitals organised nursing the ill and dying as a series of fragmented physical tasks, the same task repetitively preformed for many patients, each patient cared for by several different nurses in order to protect them from the emotional strain of death and loss. You only need to look at the way in which care workers are expected to zip in and out of people’s homes with slots so short they force them to choose between washing and feeding someone, to see that too much of this approach still lingers in the way we conceive of care today.

One of the most brilliant scientific advances of the last century has been the stretching of human lifespans; one of the least edifying aspects of collective human behaviour has been our failure to adapt to the fact that it means people have to contend with longer spells of physical and mental decline in their last years of life. As we continue to avoid an open discussion about the relative responsibilities of the state, the family and the community, the paring back of state support has resulted in family members picking up more care work. Too often, that’s low paid women in their 50s and 60s with scant pension

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While shielding older people who rely on care services was always going to be a logistical challenge for government, there has been far too little priority given to addressing the crisis in our care services. Even as some care workers take extraordinary measures – such as moving into care homes for the duration of the lockdown to protect residents and their own families – the government has failed to ensure there is adequate protective equipment and testing capacity. Care home managers and home care providers report grappling with impossible moral dilemmas with scant guidance from the government: how do you prevent coronavirus spreading when your staff don’t have protective equipment? Do you allow relatives into a care home to say goodbye to their loved ones or are the risks to other residents too great? Do you accept a new resident being discharged from a local hospital who needs a care home place but who hasn’t been tested for coronavirus, potentially jeopardising the lives of the people who already live there?

What needs to change

First, the way in which care is funded needs to be transformed. If you are unlucky enough to get cancer, the cost of your care is covered by the NHS. But if you get dementia, most people are on their own when it comes to the costs of their care – the state will only step in when you have spent most of your savings, and even then, cuts to local authority budgets mean it is increasingly difficult to get state support.

This makes no sense whatsoever. We collectivise the risk of getting ill from most diseases through the NHS. Those most able to contribute pay towards that through general taxation. We don’t say that those unlucky enough to get ill have to pay more than those who do not.

If anything, the universal principle makes even more sense applied to social care than it does healthcare. People will always be reluctant to save money towards and spend on care services; we don’t save enough to enjoy the healthy periods of our retirement, let alone for the miserable prospect of getting dementia and needing to move into a care home in the years before our death. And underfunding social care puts undue strain on the NHS. As long as we are expected to meet the costs of our own older care, people will tend to spend too little on private care services and end up requiring more expensive care on a hospital ward instead. The risk is that the less we collectively spend on social care, the more pressure the NHS will come under, the longer waiting lists will get, and the more the NHS will start to resemble social care’s two-track system as people opt for private health insurance.

So personal care needs not just to be funded properly, but to be made available free at the point of delivery, as it already is in Scotland. We also need to pay care workers more and recognise their work is anything but low skill. Lengthening lifespans come with a societal price-tag, and it’s one we are more than able to afford.

Second, we need a more explicit debate about where the responsibilities of the state, families and the community start and stop. The state can’t provide love and companionship but it can and should provide a basic standard of professional personal care. While the state can’t replace loving and kind relationships, it can certainly affect them. Expecting families to do too much, especially in situations that require skilled professional care, can negatively impact on family relationships, and it assumes that all older people have family they can rely on. As Alex Smith lays out so well in his chapter, we also need a greater focus on the role of community in creating the love, companionship and emotional support to guard against loneliness and isolation at any age.

Third, we need to fundamentally challenge ageism wherever we find it, including in ourselves. No one wants to grow old in a world where it’s considered to be enough to be free from physical harm in your last few years. But ageism is a funny kind of prejudice: like other forms, it is inculcated from a young age, but what sets it apart is that what we recoil at, and what we are ultimately all fearful of, is what we will one day become. Tackling ageism will mean confronting our fear of our own deaths.

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Making the care case

The biggest barriers to achieving all this are the latent ageism that we need to root out, the sense that this is all too uncomfortable to talk about, and the myth that we simply can’t afford the costs of ageing as a society.

On the funding, we need to stop trying to link the funding of social care to wealth taxation. It’s easy to see why politicians might think this is a good idea: there is collectively a great deal of unearned wealth in the property of people aged over 65, and it comes at the expense of a younger generation who have been locked out of an overheated housing market. The cost of housing is a zero-sum game. Surely it makes sense to put the proceeds of a collective tax on wealth towards the funding of social care?

But wealth taxation is hard to make the case for. Taxes like inheritance tax involve a large one-off payment rather than a steady contribution year-on-year, which feels like a bigger hit. That’s why Labour’s 2010 attempts to seek a cross-party consensus on funding free older care through a wealth tax ended disastrously. The case for greater wealth taxation is winnable, but it’s difficult, and attaching it to social care could stymie any attempt to find the sustainable funding care desperately needs.

Instead, we need to take a more pragmatic view. The NHS is so popular that with a bit of political leadership the public will happily pay more for it, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. Income tax is still a progressive tax, if not as progressive as wealth taxation. Polling from 2017 suggested two thirds of the public would be prepared to pay more tax in order to ensure the NHS has the funds it needs. Gordon Brown’s penny on national insurance for the NHS was supported by 76% of voters when it was introduced in 2002.

Politicians can make a case for putting social care and the NHS together by reminding us that it’s our mums and dads, aunts and uncles, grandparents and friends who are being failed and will be failed by the system. Don’t listen to those who say it’s too thorny or difficult; they’re just making excuses for a lack of political willpower.

If funding is the easy bit, much harder is taking steps to tackle the ageism and fear of decline that is holding us all back. That’s not just down to government, but to all of us. There is an emerging evidence base that suggests that sustained intergenerational relationships help to temper ageist attitudes within society. There are important initiatives in civil society that seek to do this: North London Cares is a charity that matches older and younger people living in the same area together to provide mutual companionship; HomeShare schemes connect people who might benefit from low-cost accommodation with older people with a spare room who need light-touch support to stay in their own home. They both seek to build mutually-beneficial relationships that create bonds of love, care and commitment that cannot be fully emulated by paid professional care. The mutual aid groups that have been formed in communities across the country will also be building these sorts of relationships. Political leadership is fundamental to creating a better world in which to grow old, but it’s not enough. Emerging from the coronavirus crisis with a shared commitment to providing dignity in later life is down to all of us.

Sonia Sodha is the Chief Leader writer for the Observer and a Guardian columnist. She is a trustee of Trust for London. @soniasodha

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How do we repay our debt to the NHS and the people who power it? Lewis Atkinson

Before Coronavirus, the British public had already identified that the NHS was what made them proudest to be British. The public support shown for the NHS in recent weeks – from rainbows in windows, #ClapForCarers, to companies producing PPE for their local hospitals – has been hugely moving to staff, strengthening resolve in extraordinarily challenging times. The NHS’ place as ‘the closest thing we have to a national religion’ seems further established. There are risks to treating the NHS as a religion though. As others have noted, if NHS staff are thought of as ‘saints’ or ‘angels’ then we risk not recognising their human needs and fallibilities. What’s more, if the NHS is considered sacred, we might think it is perfect and that it needs just to be ‘saved’ and ‘protected’ from those who would do it harm, rather than encouraged and indeed challenged to ‘always be changing, growing and improving’ as Bevan said it must. The first place to look for improvement is in how we staff the frontline. At the start of this crisis, when it was feared the NHS would be overwhelmed, huge efforts were made to bolster staffing – bringing the recently retired back into service and accelerating the release of those in training. Such efforts reflected not just the uncertainty of the demands to come but also knowledge that in recent years the NHS has struggled with persistent staff shortages with more than 100,000 posts vacant in England, (equal to 8.5% of staff) in 2018. Vacancies are often caused by lack of available qualified staff rather than lack of budgets – cuts to training places and financial support for trainees in the last decade has contributed to a shortage in England of more than 40,000 nurses. The commitment of NHS staff throughout coronavirus has been unstinting: working long additional hours, separated from their families, suffering physically, experiencing mental trauma. Tragically more than 100 NHS staff so far have died. NHS staff numbers must be increased, not just to allow recovery from coronavirus but to reduce the significant reported burdens on existing staff. As an urgent first step we must retain the staff we have. The NHS has for some time relied on significant immigration: 1 in 8 NHS staff are foreign nationals. There must be permanent leave to remain for all foreign national NHS workers. The long-awaited NHS People Plan was due for publication as coronavirus hit. Announcements suggested a key plank of policy, alongside improved retention and increased training, would be an intensification of efforts at ‘ethical international recruitment’, the ‘ethical’ emphasis recognising past questioning of whether active recruitment of clinicians from developing countries with healthcare shortages is appropriate. In a post-pandemic world, when all other countries’ health systems will be more fragile and will need capacity to deal with further coronavirus spikes, the feasibility and appropriateness of an international recruitment strategy is likely to face more scrutiny.

An alternative is desperately needed – staff shortages mean that even in ‘normal’ times many NHS Trusts cannot open the capacity they wish to, and this has contributed to the occupancy rates of NHS beds rising steadily in recent years to above 90%: a level that few believe is consistent with the highest quality care. Fears that coronavirus admissions added to existing high bed occupancy would overwhelm hospitals seemed a key driver for the guidance that patients must be urgently discharged to care homes at the start of the crisis – which created significant conflict and may, in retrospect, have put additional pressure on a sector that was already fragile, as Sonia Sodha notes in her piece.

The impact of persistent staff shortages on front-line care was such that in the 2019 NHS staff survey, only 32% of staff agreed that ‘there are enough staff in this organisation for me to do my job properly’, and 40% of NHS staff reported feeling unwell as a result of work-related stress. The toll of giving care during this crisis has led to significant further mental health pressures on NHS staff.

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Despite the shortages and stresses, all NHS staff, from cleaners to consultants, from porters to physiotherapists, have pulled together in the crisis. Yet while all staff employed directly by the NHS now earn at least the living wage, there are an estimated 100,000 staff who are part of the NHS team who are contracted out to private or Trust subsidiary companies and who receive poorer basic and sick pay as a result. After coronavirus, it should be unthinkable that any member of the NHS team is paid less than the living wage – and the unity of commitment shown by all NHS staff should be reflected in a unified employment structure and an end to a two-tier NHS workforce.

Health is deeply unequal in Britain

The impact of coronavirus has been proportionately higher on poorer communities and among BAME groups, with more than twice as many deaths per head of population in the poorest parts of England compared to the wealthiest areas, and among British black Africans and British Pakistanis. The extent to which existing poor health can lead to further poor health has been made more visible to the public by the explicit need to ‘shield’ those with underlying health conditions from further health risks.

Coronavirus reveals that underlying health conditions are not equally distributed across the population, and that differential mortality by socio-economic group is far from a unique feature of this disease. Despite providing universal free-at-the-point-of-access healthcare through the NHS, the UK has huge existing health inequalities: a boy born in the most deprived part of the country is expected to live more than 9 years less than one born in the wealthiest – and that gap has been growing in the last decade. People living in lower socio-economic groups have 60% more chance of having a long-term underlying health condition, and when the poorest people do get sick they have worse outcomes. Overall, 140,000 deaths a year in the UK are considered to be avoidable – with men in the most deprived areas 4.5 times more likely to die from an avoidable cause than those in the least deprived areas.

The NHS has a role to play in promoting health and ensuring equity of access to the best healthcare – but levels of health are overwhelmingly caused by ‘broader determinants of health’ rather than healthcare provision itself and therefore must be addressed by cross-government action. Unfortunately implementation of the recommendations from the 2010 Marmot review of health inequalities has stalled and public health funding for local authorities has been cut by more than 20% since 2015.

It’s time to stop people’s health being determined by how much money they have or where they live by establishing a national strategy on health inequalities, galvanising action and setting targets to reduce such inequalities and investing in health prevention by reversing the 20% cuts made to the local authority public health grant since 2015.

Building on the NHS’ strengths: towards a better, more resilient future health service

Since coronavirus was declared a serious national incident, the NHS has responded with remarkable speed, including creating the equivalent of 53 district general hospitals worth of capacity and rolling out overnight digital appointments. The scale and pace of these actions reveals key NHS strengths: a truly national service allowing full integration with the government’s emergency management arrangements including the military and concentration of provision in a relatively small number of provider Trusts allowing consistency of approach and local integration. But the speed of transformation in response to coronavirus only highlights the impediments the NHS faces to change in more normal times, including the confusing structures and forced-competition regime imposed by the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.

High-profile concerns about PPE supply and distribution have highlighted the extent to which healthcare supply is now global in nature. Less noted has been the extent to which, while British testing capacity was constrained, Germany’s leading biotech industry was able to provide at volume the reagents that laboratories require, allowing Germany to test more than any other European country at an earlier stage of the crisis. With the government maintaining that there are no circumstances in which it would agree to an extension to the Brexit transition there is an urgent need to develop an emergency healthcare supply approach.

We can build and learn from the NHS’ coronavirus response by doing two things. Firstly, simplifying the NHS’ structure, allowing NHS providers to continue to change services for the benefit of the populations

Our Other National Debt | May 2020 56 they serve, with a reduced number of intermediate organisations and the removal of mandated competition. And secondly, by enhancing our healthcare supply capability – considering whether greater strategic national capacity in health manufacturing needs to be developed, and ensuring low-friction trade in healthcare products after the Brexit transition ends.

With huge public and political support for the NHS’ response to coronavirus, a key determinant in whether these changes are adopted will be the extent to which policy-makers become convinced that they must be a necessary part of the post-coronavirus NHS settlement.

Improvements to NHS staffing numbers, pay and terms and conditions face potential barriers from any renewal of public sector austerity during a post-coronavirus recession, and the risk from any emerging narrative that ‘there were enough staff to deal with coronavirus, so there must be enough staff to run the NHS in normal times’. There is a risk that the NHS workforce who deserve additional recognition following coronavirus becomes defined solely as those clinicians on the frontline, and that critical support staff, especially those who are contracted out on lower pay, are not made a priority for investment and recognition.

Furthermore, there is a risk that high levels of NHS support will reduce once the negative impact of the wholescale cancellation of NHS elective activity due to coronavirus is felt – with some suggesting it may take 5 years for elective surgery waiting times to return to levels the public expect.

Coronavirus will mark a moment of fundamental reset for healthcare in the UK. With the NHS’ operating model fundamentally changed and the impact on staff, waiting lists and the wider health of the population likely to persist for years to come, it seems inconceivable there will not be a significant policy and likely structural reset.

The history of NHS reform suggests that the most enduring changes, such as those heralded by the 2000 NHS Plan, are those sought by the government but that command wide support from a coalition of established health and civil society organisations and prominent individuals.

So how can we ensure that after coronavirus the government is inspired to take the specific actions necessary to ensure a fairer NHS that does right for all of its staff, that works within a renewed national focus on tackling health inequalities, and that is able to evolve rapidly to meet future challenges without being slowed by the burdens of overlapping structures and forced-competitions?

It sometimes seems there is limited health-specific campaigning institutional infrastructure in the UK, with the existing non-governmental organisational actors tending to be endowed think tanks focused on expert policy analysis, disease specific charities, or trades unions representing staff.

To win the change needed to repay our coronavirus debt, we need an approach that harnesses the huge public support and political backing for the NHS into clear and specific asks. We need to move from claps to campaigns – and the formation of an umbrella health campaigning coalition of NHS staff unions, patient groups, and wider public NHS supporters would give the best chance of ensuring it is staff and the public driving the changes that will come.

Lewis Atkinson works for the NHS in the North East of England. @LewisNHS

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Section Four: Our place in the world

Our place in the world

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Our debt to those beyond our shores: how do we reinvigorate internationalism after coronavirus? George Graham

The pandemic is stretching us in two opposing directions. On the one hand, we are more domestically focussed than ever before, spending most of our hours at home and following local news obsessively. On the other, we are living through one of the few truly global events of our lives – a challenge that has emerged directly because of our worldwide interconnectedness, that is affecting everyone everywhere, and that will only be met through concerted international effort. How we manage this tension over the coming months will determine our futures for years to come.

Those of us committed to championing international causes must begin from a bracing realisation: the most prominent global intergovernmental forums – the United Nations Security Council and the G20 and G7 groups of nations – have all demonstrably failed to rise to the coronavirus challenge. The Security Council has lost itself in debates about whether tackling the virus falls within its remit, whether to support the UN Secretary General’s call for a global ceasefire and who to blame for the emergence of the virus in the first place. The G20 and G7 have similarly been unable to reach consensus and the European Union is also struggling, with its long-running fault-line between the richer northern states and the weaker southern ones becoming even more pronounced.

Away from the diplomatic circuit dominated by the world’s richest nations, the virus has highlighted the vast inequality in wealth, wellbeing and life-chances that persist between the richer countries hit first and hardest and the poorer nations which are even more desperately unprepared. As of the start of April, Somalia’s Health Ministry did not have a single ventilator, the Central African Republic had three, South Sudan had four and Liberia had five. As the virus takes hold in places like these, we can expect devastation on a scale that many of us had dared to believe was now behind us. The head of the World Food Programme has warned of the risk of “a famine of biblical proportions”.

Financial transparency and accountability, fair trade and overseas aid are fundamental to reducing and ending the poverty that claims so many lives. But in the world right now, in the time of coronavirus, tax havens continue to facilitate the flight of capital from the world’s poorest places, trade barriers block the emergence of economic self-reliance and most aid donors are falling short of the long-standing target of spending 0.7% of gross national income on development assistance.

The crisis has also highlighted the world’s failure to get a grip on armed violence. The world is currently reeling from more conflicts than at any time since 1946, contributing to the displacement of a record 70 million people. Some of these conflicts are fuelled or abetted by major powers – for example, as people in Yemen scramble to contain the threat of coronavirus, including with UK aid money, British nationals are servicing jets that are being used to perpetuate a senseless conflict that is making the task of containing coronavirus more or less insurmountable. In a crowded camp in Idlib, Syria, a fourteen-year-old boy recently told one of my colleagues, ‘We’re used to the war now. Even when it hits nearby, we hide in caves. But with this virus, we can’t hide.’ In places like these, it will simply not be possible to contain the virus, posing a threat to all of us as well as to those who have already suffered so much.

The picture, however, is not entirely gloomy, not least as nation states and formal multilateral institutions are far from being the sum total of what we mean when we talk about internationalism. As the pandemic has taken hold, we have seen an extraordinary increase in global health and scientific cooperation. For example, scientists from Oxford University are working with researchers in Kenya on a possible vaccine trial there. Such collaboration is vital for scientific breakthroughs – the Ebola vaccine, for instance, was discovered in Canada, developed in the USA and manufactured in Germany. Powerful semi-formal and informal connections such as these are precious – indeed they may save our lives.

Similarly, our social media feeds are filled with analysis, stories, memes and jokes from other countries, as we learn from each other’s experiences in this tough and unusual time. The Global Citizen ‘One World:

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th Together At Home’ concert on 20 April was a vibrant example of what global cultural experiences can look like – at the time of writing, the worldwide viewing figures were over 270 million and still counting.

Who has paid a heavier price and how do we repay them?

As was acknowledged during that concert, the people around the world to whom we owe the greatest debts of gratitude are the health workers, the scientists, the policymakers, the carers and the ‘key workers’ in every country whose efforts are saving lives and livelihoods right now. Among these, we are indebted to the people who have kept the spirit of international cooperation alive – people who have offered their resources, time and expertise to those in other countries in order to support them in preparing for and responding to the virus and its effects.

The people around the world who are owed the profoundest apologies, meanwhile, are those who have suffered or who will suffer as a consequence of the flaws in the international response to coronavirus. This long list includes people in every country – indeed, to some extent it includes all 7.8 billion of us – but it will be people in the poorest countries or in places marred by violence who will have paid the highest price.

To spell it out, for many people in poor countries, social distancing is simply not possible, either because their living conditions do not allow it or because the imperative to work to sustain a living trumps any other consideration. Moreover, people who have grown up poor are more likely to be malnourished or to have underlying health conditions, and they will rely more heavily on the very same health systems that are being so stretched by the pandemic. Estimates published in The Lancet on the indirect effects of the pandemic on maternal and child mortality in poor countries are stark: they project a worst-case scenario of more than 1 million additional children and more than 50,000 more mothers dying in the next six months alone.

The UN has calculated that 84-132 million people worldwide could be pushed into extreme poverty by the effects of the pandemic, among them 42-66 million children. There is now a real and present danger that the 2020s will become a ‘lost decade’ of unprecedented reversals in development. The phenomenal progress that the world has seen in recent decades, and the hope that is encapsulated in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, is in serious jeopardy.

Given that the formal multilateral system is so stuck, and that political and economic realities pose such powerful countervailing forces against greater international cooperation, those of us who are championing this cause will need to think and act creatively and broadly:

● While traditional multilateral action is stymied by conflict between some of the heavyweight nations (in particular, the US and China, and, in a different way, Russia), we can devise workarounds. The world needs a cohort of national leaders who commit themselves to multilateral action to tackle global problems independent of whether other powerful states join. The UK Government should not only be part of this effort but should help lead it.

● Development cooperation is more critical than ever. The UK’s commitment to spending 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance makes a profound difference to millions of lives, signals sincere commitment to tackling the most fundamental global challenges and gives the UK significant legitimacy and support on the world stage. It needs to be defended.

● The persistence of conflict is one of the biggest drivers of vulnerability around the world with devastating impacts (including, but certainly not limited to, controlling the spread of disease). The UK has the potential to play a hugely constructive role here, modelling best practice in its own approaches and driving up higher standards from others. It should develop and publish a cross-Government ‘Protection of Civilians’ strategy, lead the way on improving the tracking and recording of civilian harm in conflict, support international efforts to constrain the worst forms of violence such as the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, invest in peace processes and peacebuilding, and take much more seriously its role in holding perpetrators of violations to account – including among its own allies.

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How can we revive the internationalism that the world so desperately needs?

Some of the barriers to success here are attitudinal – a vague sentiment that says overseas problems are not our problems. As we know from Save the Children’s own work on defending aid and development, public attitudes like these are generally soft and become more positive after empathetic engagement. The bigger barrier is ideological, as touched on in Imran Ahmed’s essay. We are up against some powerful political forces and their digital outriders who want to erode the bastions of international cooperation in order to strengthen the autonomy of nation states. Proponents of this view will need to be either marginalised or defeated.

By far the greatest barrier, however, is economic. As we look forward to a future of vastly constrained public finances and an economy that is likely to require some form of life support for months or years to come, the case for forms of international cooperation that incur any financial cost will be far harder to make than in the past.

In some ways, the coronavirus is a test-run for more serious trials ahead. Worse pandemics are easily imaginable and some of the challenges we were already confronting as a species – including climate change, massive environmental destruction, nuclear proliferation, armed violence, poverty and weakening respect for human rights – are even more complex and ultimately far more harmful.

This observation can be read in two ways. Glass half empty, one could conclude that if we’re finding this one tough, we haven’t got a chance against anything more severe; glass half full, one could conclude that coronavirus has shown that humanity is demonstrably capable of taking serious measures when it absolutely needs to. Either way, the pandemic clearly reinforces the imperative to get much better at collective action across borders. This is a basis to work from.

We need to encourage our leaders to be boldly international in their politics and practice, and we need to be tactical in trying to defeat those voices who argue the opposite. The UK Government, and all of us as citizens, should be looking to strengthen networks everywhere – between government agencies, universities, religious bodies, civil society and culture. In doing so we need to avoid frames that emphasise the differences between us as humans and instead play up the connections between us. Neither the science that has driven so much historical progress nor the art or culture that sustain us is exclusively national – we should be confident in saying so.

It may be that we need to find heroes – genuinely global figures who can inspire millions with their vision or actions. Gandhi, King and Mandela all began as national figures, but they transcended that status and eventually became touchstones for ideas and causes that continue to inspire people in every country of the world today. But heroes are not always easy to come by, so we will also need to find ways to do their work ourselves. Wherever we come from and whatever our circumstances, we all share a common humanity. This is the idea that guided the heroes of the past and must sustain us now in the work we do, the networks we create and the stories we tell.

George Graham is Director of Conflict and Humanitarian Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns at Save the Children. He is a trustee of Conciliation Resources. @georgewgraham

Our Other National Debt | May 2020

Our ​Other National Debt

Our Other National Debt