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Editorial The Treasury’s obfuscation on furlough and self-isolation amounts to deliberate deceit

GOVERNMENT public health advice has been confused and confusing since the beginning of the pandemic.

Now we learn that the Treasury deliberately added to the obfuscation, hiding the availability of sick pay support for those self-isolating.

Shifting goalposts and complex guidance, much of which is open to varying interpretations, have made it hard to follow the rules. And easy for those willing to play fast and loose with others’ safety to get away with it.

So guidance on working from home has been to do so if you can: but the TUC has found many employers forcing their staff back into workplaces even where working from home is possible. 

If working from home is not possible, no measure of whether the work is essential or not is applied: so even during lockdowns large numbers were made to travel into work simply to boost their bosses’ profits.

Nor has enforcement of safe working practices been a priority: despite 3,872 workplace Covid outbreaks since April 2020, not one employer has faced legal repercussions.

The chaos and incompetence long suspected at the heart of government has been confirmed in spades in continuing leaks from former Tory strategist Dominic Cummings: attempts by other Conservatives to discredit his testimony — on the accurate grounds that he is untrustworthy — are doomed since Cummings’s “bombshells” tally so accurately with demonstrable facts, and he has access to too much incriminating material.

Hence we now know that the PM’s top adviser can describe the Department of Health as a “shitshow” in the midst of a public health crisis and the PM can respond casually that the minister responsible is “hopeless,” without taking any action on the matter.

But deliberately hiding the support available from workers goes beyond incompetence to the deliberate adoption of policies known to put lives at risk.

As epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani says of the Tories’ overall approach to the pandemic, “they have been fully informed on the risks to public health, the risk of mass deaths … but have gone ahead with this anyway because these risks and the impact on people were considered acceptable.”

The role played by poverty in the spread of Covid-19 in Britain has been evident for over a year.

The TUC was pointing last summer to the difficulty of expecting workers to isolate when they faced serious loss of income for doing so. 

In July, test-and-trace chief Dido Harding was admitting to the Lords that there were big financial disincentives to isolate, and that workers were reluctant even to be tested because they could not afford to comply with the isolation required by a positive result.

This was one of the main causes of the failure of test and trace and the second wave of Covid-19 last autumn.

Yet now we learn that the Treasury was “reluctant” to “say explicitly” that employers could apply for furlough to cover wages during employees’ self-isolation in case it led to “employees being furloughed who do not need to be.”

And the emails complaining about this reluctance date from January and February this year, long after the lethal consequences of making it difficult to isolate became clear.

It’s perhaps an unsurprising reservation from a Tory Party on the take, whose ministers appear solely concerned with how far they can enrich themselves and their cronies from the pandemic response. 

Their assumption that the entire population operates on the same principle has led to government departments deliberately trying to mislead people about their own policies. 

It would be shocking — if the deliberate design of unnecessarily complex systems to confuse and intimidate applicants were not a long-established feature of the entire Tory approach to social security.

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