Another involved in the decisions remembers feeling the scale of the decisions “washed over me”, saying, “it was totally and utterly necessary and right at the time, but we knew there’d just be such a huge adjustment, nationalising a big part of the private sector for a long period of time”.
It was “uncertain and uncomfortable, you never want to be in government like that,” they added.
In the end, government spent about £70bn paying people’s wages under the furlough scheme. But research later calculated the net cost was £25bn because it preserved jobs and the economy in the longer run.
“It was a time of genuine and acute crisis, when people expect government to stand behind them,” one former official says now.
Two years later, with Liz Truss campaigning to become prime minister, one former No 10 official says while she was “out campaigning saying ‘no handouts’… I was being shown modelling of households earning £50-60,000 who’d fall into fuel poverty.
“It was very clear something was going to have to be done. Pubs, nail bars, lots of business would have ceased trading if we hadn’t.”
When Truss arrived in No 10 she promised to help pay household bills for a full two years – capping them at £2,500 – with six months’ support for businesses.
Just like furlough, ministers and officials had no idea how much it would ultimately cost taxpayers. One recalls: “We had no way of knowing what it cost. Treasury were giving me costs of £40-£150bn. I was like, ‘Guys, that’s not helpful.’ And we had no idea how we would do it.”
One of her team remembers: “I remember Liz saying if the market could swallow hundreds of billions of Covid loans because it felt like the right thing to do, then an energy bailout felt perfectly legitimate.”
The alternative was bills rocketing and the “potential for blackouts, tipping people in poverty into not being able to pay their bills, even dying, and a winter of discontent”.