Rishi Sunak faces calls for an inquiry into whether Treasury officials buried or ignored evidence that his £849m “eat out to help out” scheme fuelled the spread of the pandemic.
Officials dismissed a Warwick University study in October 2020 that said Sunak’s initiative may have caused a significant rise in Covid-19 infections. The report estimated 8%-17% of detected new clusters could be linked to the scheme.
Despite the government categorically rejecting the findings, the publication of former health secretary Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages appears to confirm that there were concerns about the then chancellor’s scheme in summer 2020 driving an increase in infections.
In the leaked messages obtained by the Daily Telegraph, Hancock told the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, that he had “kept it out of news” that the initiative was spreading the virus. He said his department had informed the Treasury and was “protecting” officials.
Jonathan Portes, a professor in economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant at the Treasury, said: “It looks on the face of it that [the Treasury] was deliberately trying to conceal what the evidence was about eat out to help out.
“We need to know what exactly the Department of Health told the Treasury, what was said internally about the data and what the advice was to ministers.”
He said the evidence to date suggested there may have been a “cover-up” and the Treasury needed to publish all the relevant documents. He said it was “disgraceful” and “unprofessional” to dismiss the Warwick University paper, which was on a matter of significant public interest, and there should now be an inquiry.
The scheme, which was launched in August 2020, was one of Sunak’s measures when he was chancellor to support the economy as it reopened after lockdown. It offered a 50% discount, up to £10 per head, on meals and soft drinks on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Businesses could claim the money back on a weekly basis from HM Revenue and Customs.
A working paper published by Thiemo Fetzer, an economics professor at Warwick University, found the initiative was closely linked to an increase in new cases during August and into early September. The paper found the virus spread more rapidly in areas with lots of participating restaurants and said the scheme might have “public health costs that vastly outstrip its short-term economic benefits”.
Fetzer said on Saturday he had made a submission to the Covid-19 public inquiry and he considered the scheme should now be examined as part of the hearings. He said: “The second wave of the pandemic was seeded in the summer and eat out to help out contributed to that.
“It was only available on Monday, Tuesdays and Wednesday, so people shifted their dining patterns. It created crowded spaces.”
He said the Treasury had dismissed his work, but had not provided any substantial evidence that the scheme did not cause a rise in infections. “They did not do a rigorous analysis,” he said. In January 2021, the Treasury said its own analysis had shown that areas with a high take-up of the scheme had low subsequent Covid-19 cases. The Institute for Government said that analysis was “pretty thin” and did not engage properly with criticisms of the scheme.
The concern in government that the scheme was spreading the pandemic is revealed in Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. On 24 August 2020, while the initiative was still running, he wrote to Case, saying: “We have had lots of feedback that [eat out to help out] is causing problems… I’ve kept it out of the news but it’s serious. So please please lets not allow the economic success of the scheme to lead to its extension.”
Hancock later referred to the scheme in another message in December 2020 as “eat out to help the virus get about”.
A government source said: “We’ve been over this so many times. Many European countries experienced an uptick in virus transmission at the exact same time as the UK, including those without similar hospitality support schemes.” Officials say that many European countries experienced an increase in infections at the same time, but did not introduce policies targeted at increasing demand in the hospitality sector.
They consider it is difficult to isolate reasons for transmission, but say it appears the spread of the infection was largely driven by private gatherings, household transmission and not following social distancing measures.
