MP, Labour’s Shadow Chief
Secretary to the Treasury, responding to
Rishi Sunak’s comments that there will be “deadweight” in £1,000
jobs retention bonus, said:
“The Government have had months to prepare for the end of
lockdown and design targeted support to protect jobs - but
instead we have an on-the-hoof fix that the Chancellor himself
admits risks wasting billions of pounds of taxpayer
money.
"Hard-pressed sectors where thousands of jobs are at risk,
like aviation, oil and gas, and tourism, will be missing out on
the help they need while companies who are returning to normal
get public money they don’t.
"The Chancellor should be targeting support on those who
need it, not handing it out aimlessly to those who don’t. It’s
not brave to admit the Government plans to waste billions at a
time when others are crying out for support.”
Ends
Notes to Editors
· https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1281124564236369922?s=21
Transcript from Today Interview with :
Isn’t likely to be though what economists call a deadweight
cost because it could be going to some employers who will keep
staff on anyway?
Yes, I think that is absolutely a fair point and throughout
this crisis I have had the decisions to make whether to act in a
broad way at scale and at speed or to act in a more targeted and
nuanced way. And in an ideal world you are absolutely right, you
would minimise that deadweight and do everything in an incredibly
targeted fashion. The problem is the severity of what was
happening to our economy, the scale of what was happening and
indeed the speed that it was happening at demanded a different
response.
So some money, some taxpayer money, will be wasted?
Without question there will be deadweight and there has
been deadweight in all of the interventions we have put in place
and there will be some degree of moral hazard. In an ideal world
we wouldn't be doing those things but in order to get something
like the furlough scheme up and running in the few weeks that we
did, we did not have the luxury of being able to design something
that would target exactly everyone who specifically needed it
now.
