Eat Out to Help Out is the best thing Rishi’s done

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak places an Eat Out to Help Out sticker in the window of a business

Ask me to be grumpy about Rishi Sunak and I have multiple avenues of angst available to take you down. In fact, there is almost no major political issue on which he would win my approval.

But his Eat Out To Help Out policy, unleashed when Sunak was Chancellor after the first Covid lockdown had finished in summer 2020, is an exception.

The Prime Minister is facing a heavy berating at the official Covid Inquiry over the scheme, which is deemed to have contributed to the onset of the second wave of the disease. No doubt he will get flak when, eventually, it publishes its final written report – though he will probably be long retired by then, from politics at least.

Yet it is easily forgotten quite how traumatised the nation was by the sudden onset of a deadly plague early in 2020 and the extraordinary restrictions which the Government imposed. The hospitality industry was on its knees. Many people spoke as if mask-wearing and scurrying round the supermarket first thing in the morning before fleeing back to the safety of home was going to be a permanent “new normal”.

And then Sunak’s Treasury intervened with something they knew large swathes of the British public would find hard to resist – an absolute bargain. This came in the form of a big discount on restaurant meals and pub grub. On every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in August the Government subsidised meals out to the tune of up to £10 per person, reducing the overall bill by a maximum of 50 per cent.

The Treasury reckons that in all some 160 million meals were subsidised at a cost of almost £850 million. In our household, we must have taken up the offer at least half a dozen times. The sun continued to shine, as it had done all spring and early summer too, and so pub beer gardens were our preferred venues. Though alcoholic drinks were not included in the deal, the relatively cheap price of pub food meant the tenner a head discount sliced a big percentage off the overall cost of each family excursion.

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On several occasions we saw people we knew and were able to reconnect, swapping our Covid stories for the first time. Optimism was in the air. Life felt sweet again. We even began to believe that perhaps there would be no second wave at all.

That of course was the Achilles heel of the scheme from the point of view of the public health commissars: it encouraged us to drop our guards, gave us a taste of a long lost feelgood factor and reminded us that man is a social animal.

For the people in charge of the graphs this was all terrible news. An optimal situation for them would have been for every person in the country to have spent the entire month shut in a room, knees under the chin, rocking back and forth in a state of determined hermitism. Instead, “R” began to tick upwards again and by the time the clocks changed at the end of October the Covid threat was worse than ever.

Yet that is only to look at one side of the ledger. It attaches no value to all the joy and life-affirming experiences that Eat Out to Help Out gave us. Even as a brief interregnum between lockdowns, encouraging the return of social life may well have had vital positive psychological effects. And then there was the vital cash-injection it gave to pubs, cafes and restaurants. At least Sunak, former banker that he is, was thinking about the long-term economic impact entailed by shutting everything down.

Are there people who died who would be alive today were it not for the policy? In theory, probably yes. But that is true in the case of thousands of political decisions: from the shift patterns of NHS medical staff (don’t get ill on a Sunday) to horse-riding being legal (leading to an average of ten fatalities a year and hundreds of serious spinal injuries). But no leading politician is arguing to ban horse-riding, or rugby for that matter. Because freedom matters and there is a quality-of-life cost to banning enjoyment that is rarely measured by the public health police.

And are we really to believe that a second wave of Covid could have been avoided going into autumn and winter? Usable vaccines were still several months away. Is anyone asking what the cost would have been – both psychological and financial – of not encouraging people to share some good times over the summer?

So as far as the “Rishi’s Dishes” scheme goes, I prefer the verdict of someone I was chatting to the other night: “It’s about the only good thing he ever did.” And yes, that was indeed from a bloke down the pub.

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