Today’s National Day of Reflection is, fittingly, modelled on Remembrance Sunday (formerly Armistice Day) with a minute’s silence and a symbolic flower. But Armistice Day was never just about remembering. The original red poppies had “Never Again” written on them, demonstrating the determination to use the horrific experience of the war to forge a new peace. Similarly, today is not only a time to reflect on our collective loss, it is also a chance to consider what we have learned about our economic and social structures and decide what we want to hold on to and to change.
The first lesson is that governments can achieve truly impressive results when they put their minds to it. The furlough scheme has supported more than 11m jobs since March 2020 and successfully prevented mass unemployment while large swathes of the economy were shut down.
The much-maligned Universal Credit system has been a quieter but significant success story. The number of claims rose from 2.8m pre-pandemic to six million by January 2021. The system not only held up, but the proportion of people getting their full payment on time continued to climb. The government should take pride in the fact that incomes have remained flat this year. Add to this the UK’s vaccination programme, and it is clear that governments and public services can deliver fast, effective protection for both our health and our economy.
The other great success story of the pandemic has been neighbourliness and grassroots community organising. There are countless tales of local people pulling together and supporting one another, collected online in places such as Nottinghamshire County Council’s “Stories of Community Support during the Coronavirus pandemic.” An intensely local social infrastructure sprang up, using digital apps and word of mouth to identify need and get food and support to those cut off from other services.
However, the pandemic has also uncovered failures in our economic and social systems that we should aim to leave behind.
Despite the operational success of Universal Credit, Covid exposed weaknesses in our social security system that we cannot ignore any longer. In 2019, Theresa May’s government announced proposals to extend statutory sick pay to around two million of the UK’s lowest-paid workers who were excluded from the system. But the plans were shelved when she left office, leaving us to face a pandemic with a system under which millions of workers could not afford to take sick leave.
Beyond specific gaps, Covid also brought into sharp relief the underlying conflict at the heart of the UK’s social security system. There are two warring concepts within it: one is a contribution-based, collective insurance system, replacing earnings for those who have paid in; the other is a need-based safety net, with benefits providing a floor beneath which the living standards of those eligible will not fall. Over the last couple of decades, the contribution-based earnings replacement side has been left to wither away, leaving many who turned to the system for the first time shocked at the low level of support compared to their previous earnings.
At the same time, successive cuts and freezes undermined the adequacy of the safety net. The UK government acknowledged that benefits had been cut too far to provide a reasonable income when it boosted Universal Credit payments early in the pandemic. The chancellor is now fighting to cut those benefits again in the autumn, but many others have recognised that now is the time to both restore the adequacy of the system and clarify its purpose.
The labour and housing markets, meanwhile, have been exposed as baking in insecurity for those with the fewest resources to weather it. During the pandemic these market failures fuelled the public health crisis as well as creating millions of personal crises for individuals.
Before Covid, around 13 per cent of the workforce were in insecure work. They were concentrated in low-paid jobs, often swept into poverty, struggling to afford essentials and keep up with bills, unable to build up savings. This level of insecurity had been invisible to most of those fortunate enough to work in the rest of the economy but was exposed as these workers lost their jobs and earnings while others were protected. Many built up further debt and fell behind with bills and rent. They are now even more insecure—and face further risk in the coming wave of unemployment when the furlough scheme ends in the Autumn.
This insecurity is compounded by the design of the housing market. A paucity of social housing has left millions stuck in an under-regulated private rented sector. High rents lock people in poverty, wipe out the gains from rising wages and condemn many to live in damp, overcrowded and insecure homes.
The King’s Fund, among other health organisations, has shown the negative impacts of this on people’s long-term health and wellbeing. Recent polling suggests one in seven adults in England are worried about becoming homeless. During months of being confined inside, the importance of having a secure and healthy home has never been clearer. As we move out of the health crisis we must take the chance to redesign a housing market which makes this a distant prospect for millions.
In sum, we must harness the power governments have to act decisively and effectively and demand they redesign those parts of our economy and services that are harming us. And we must recognise that local communities are a powerhouse of compassion and ingenuity: we should create structures which give them the support to flourish and the space to innovate.
This National Day of Reflection is not the same as the first Armistice Day—we have not yet defeated Covid. But it can play a similar role; helping us to heal through collective grieving and to look forward with hope—and a determination to build a better tomorrow.
