Do not ‘go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over’

Recognising that the situation has quickly moved beyond the measures announced in the Budget only last week, Rishi Sunak has unveiled another coronavirus rescue package. The assistance is for businesses, which will have access to grants, tax cuts and government-backed loans totalling over £330bn. This is an extraordinary figure and a substantial level of support that will help prevent bankruptcies, though of course the last thing businesses with no certainty want to do right now is take out loans. The business rates holiday for all firms in the retail, leisure and hospitality sectors will be most welcome. But what about the self-isolating workers, those being sacked, the self-employed, the renters?

The contents of the coronavirus bill have been released. There is plenty of scary stuff designed to increase capacity, from removing time limits in mental health legislation and relaxing standards in adult social care to allowing burials and cremations to take place with fewer checks. There is little designed to directly help people with the financial impact of Covid-19. The only measure is bringing forward statutory sick pay entitlement to day one, yet on that point alone there really needs to be an increase in SSP and an extension to the self-employed and low-paid funded by government where necessary.

In Sunak’s latest rescue package, mortgage holidays were offered. Nothing for renters, however. There are over 20 million of us, and most have no savings. Labour has been calling for rent deferrals, but Jeremy Corbyn last night tweeted that rents should be suspended as well as evictions of coronavirus-affected tenants banned. The government has said that policies to protect renters will be revealed “in the coming days”. Switch on talk radio, and there are already plenty of callers saying they have been sacked or their contract has been reduced to zero-hours. People need this security urgently.

Significant omissions such as these will surely be the focus of Corbyn at PMQs this afternoon. It is quite incredible that these sessions are still going ahead as normal. While the government has advised against gatherings, MPs are squeezed together on the green benches to discuss ‘social distancing’, practically sitting on top of each other. Even the Lords are still going in the same way. Talk about mixed messages.

The ability to scrutinise government is obviously hugely important at this time, but there must be measures to safeguard everyone working in parliament and stop putting out confusing signals. And I hope that lobby journalists will soon be able to submit questions to the daily press conferences remotely. As one of the government’s top coronavirus experts Neil Ferguson, in Downing Street on Tuesday and now in self-isolation, tweeted: “There is a lot of Covid-19 in Westminster.”

Having Boris Johnson’s father on TV talk about how he’ll go to the pub regardless of government advice does not help either. It was only two weeks ago that the Prime Minister himself boasted of shaking hands with everyone in a hospital. Labour must play a crucial role in making sure that the government looks at countries further ahead in dealing with the pandemic and does not keep lagging behind.

Update, 11.45pm: Only a limited number of MPs – including the Prime Minister, Jeremy Corbyn, and those on the order paper – will be allowed into the chamber for PMQs today.