Three weeks late the Guardian has noted that the government has today said:
The financial regulator has announced plans to freeze loan and credit card payments for up to three months as part of emergency measures for consumers impacted by the coronavirus outbreak.
The measures, which would usually require a lengthy consultation, could come into force as soon as 9 April. The Financial Conduct Authority said the process was being fast-tracked “given the national emergency and the significant impact on consumers' finances right now”.
In my reaction to Sunak's wholly inadequate budget on 11 March I said:
Rishi Sunak has delivered his first budget, which is also the first by a Johnson government. Anyone who had hoped that this might deliver against the three priorities that we now, very clearly have will be sorely disappointed.
Those three priorities are the need for:
- Short term measures to really tackle the coronavirus epidemic;
- Long term measures to tackle the climate crisis;
- Social measures that ensure that these crises are tackled in ways that tackle the social legacies of ten years of austerity, including low pay, high personal indebtedness, limited prospects most especially for the young, rising wealth inequality and in eat rising housing poverty.To deal with these issues Sunak had to:
- Announce bank mortgage and loan repayment holidays;
- Announce rent payment holidays;
- Ensure that the state pays for the entire cost of enhanced sick pay, because employers cannot bear this cost as they are currently expected to do;
- Ensure that sick pay would cover people's real costs when ill;
- Provide automatic tax payment holidays for smaller businesses;
- Reduce business rates for six months, and pick up the cost;
- Reduce VAT to 15% for the rest of the year;
- Underpin all the costs of the NHS so that financing does not ration coronavirus care;
- Support local authorities with social care to keep the elderly out of hospital.
At the time I think people thought I was being absurdly over the rope, except I was far from it: it's now apparent that I underestimated the scale of need. But I got loan repayment holidays right and the government has taken three weeks to catch up.
If I could see this on 11 March, why couldn't they?
And why has it taken them so long?
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You could see it as could many others. The Tory Government is only now coming to terms with the fact that outside events are forcing it to move to a much more socialist position. And they still believe the economy will be back to normal in 3 months! Nothing will be the same again once we are on top of the current crisis. They are still in the mourning phase for their right wing populist brexit agenda and have not yet accepted they need to rethink and rewrite the government role for many years to come.
Waiving bank fees and overdraft fees would help.
I see Hancock has just announced a massive debt write-off for the NHS. That’s excellent news (although I doubt it was ever going to repaid anyway given it was simply money the government owed itself). No doubt PFI contracts continue though. Too many Tory donors with their snouts in that particular pie.
See blog just published…
The day before the budget this story was in the news:
https://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/mortgages/coronavirus-mortgage-holiday-uk-a137241.html
As some-one who is pro-markets and profoundly so I think you should go easy on Sunak for not wading in the day after and making compulsory something that was largely but not wholly being dealt with already,
If I could follow your logic I’d respond
But I can’t
And I do not read homes and property
Now that Cummings is on sick leave I think there is a vacancy at number 10, I suggest you volunteer your services.