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Join three experts in the UK public affairs sector to discuss how the sector is reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic and what should be done to maintain policy engagement.

It has been confirmed by the First Secretary of State Dominic Raab that the UK lockdown restrictions will continue for at least another three weeks, and many will now be well-adjusted to remote working, not least in the public affairs sector.

Parliament, for example, has adapted to allow virtual questioning of Ministers for the first time in its 700-year history using Zoom once it returns from recess on 21 April.

The House of Commons Commission chaired by the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has announced that following the delivery of ‘hybrid proceedings’ for questioning Ministers and for PMQs led by Dominic Raab in the Prime Minister’s absence, the House will then consider extending this model for debates, motions and legislation as soon as possible.

MPs are also able to consider new temporary arrangements for remote voting. Many select Committees have already held virtual committee meetings thanks to platforms like Zoom and this is set to increase in number when the House of Commons returns.

As the First Secretary of State set five clear conditions that must be met before the Government, led by its Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) Committee, will consider relaxing any of the measures brought in to reduce the spread of COVID-19, this situation is clearly set to continue into May and perhaps even longer. Raab said in terms of relaxing the strict health and economic restrictions: ‘We will only do it when the evidence demonstrates that it is safe to do it’.

MPs are finding that their workload in terms of constituency casework and enquiries has increased significantly. One senior MP advised Vuelio that they are seeing an increase in cases of people ‘trying to access the various business support schemes’ as well as those stuck overseas and trying to return to the UK, or people trying to access benefits through the DWP and needing assistance. MPs are also seeing traditional lobbying continue as well, with various advice and suggestions on how to deal with the pandemic being sent to Ministers and backbenchers daily.

With this ongoing challenge for the public affairs sector in mind, Vuelio is hosting a webinar to discuss some of the key issues for our sector including:

• How to keep your political audiences engaged during lockdown
• How COVID-19 could impact policymaking for the long term
• The implications for your organisational strategy
• Tactics for updating your stakeholder map
• The opportunities that exist for you to maximise engagement

The webinar guests are Robin Gordon-Farleigh, a former Downing Street communications strategist and adviser to two former Prime Ministers, Nicole Wilkins, Publisher of Foresight News and Rob Dale, PRCA Consultant of the Year 2019.

Sign up to attend the webinar or, if you can’t join us live, to receive the recording afterwards.

The Head of Media at the Charities Aid Foundation, Caroline Mallan, welcomes the additional Government support for charities announced last week by Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

At the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), we were very pleased to see the Chancellor’s package of assistance for charities announced just before the Easter break – it was a welcome first step for so many charities facing uncertain futures. Moreover, Mr Sunak’s recognition in his remarks of the value of civil society – the charities, non-profits and advocacy organisations that speak for those who so often have no voice – set a gracious tone for those of us working to ensure that the charities that we rely on in our day to day lives are going to be there for the months and years to come.

We need them to survive not just because of the invaluable support they are providing on the frontlines of the battle against coronavirus, but also because when the day finally arrives when we emerge from this crisis, their mission will not have diminished.

At CAF, we have created an emergency fund for small charities, offering grants of up to £10,000 to help them survive the effects of the COVID-19 crisis. It is very telling that the fund had to pause accepting new applications after just one week when more than 5,000 organisations applied for help. Their requests totalled more than £37m, even though the initial fund was created with just £5m – a sum that we are hoping to grow thanks to the generosity of CAF’s many donors.

The statistic that has always struck me out of our extensive research into charitable giving is one from a couple of years back, that found that three-quarters of all households in the UK had used a charity in some way in recent months, but three in 10 people did not even realise that they had done so. It is just one number, but for me it speaks to the inherent role that charities play in our lives.

If you have cycled on a canal tow path, you have used a charity. If you have visited a historic palace, you have used a charity. If you have attended a small theatre production, you have used a charity. If a loved one is ill and needs to go into hospice, you will be using a charity. If a loved one suffers from dementia and spends time in a day centre – vital to offering respite to primary care givers living with people with complex and emotionally taxing health issues – then chances are that service was provided by a charity.

Charities are everywhere, they clothe the poor, feed the needy and care for the vulnerable – both people and animals. They are the guardians of our natural world and for many, they are the only connection to the world outside their own homes.

Our work at CAF is to champion charities. I can honestly say that we have never been busier or more focused on the job we have ahead of us. Many of our private clients took hours, not days or weeks, to get in touch to ask us how they could help. Our charity clients have been candid and forthcoming in helping us tell the story of the need that exists out there. The businesses we work with have never been more engaged as they strive to help in any way they can. It is heartening during some difficult times to see the depth of generosity that exists and gratifying to be able to play a small part in telling their stories and helping charities to navigate these unprecedented, choppy waters.

Caroline Mallan is the Head of Media at the Charities Aid Foundation.

The think tank Policy Exchange hosted a webinar this week bringing together some of the players who responded to the last global crisis: the banking crisis of 2008-9.

Policy Exchange hosted a webinar to discuss the economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, chaired by its Senior Fellow Juliet Samuel. It brought together three of the key players who led the UK response to the 2008 economic crisis: Lord Darling, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord King, the former Governor of the Bank of England and Lord Macpherson, former Permanent Secretary at HM Treasury. They were joined by Dr Gerard Lyons, newly appointed Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and a former adviser to Boris Johnson when he was Mayor of London.

Juliet Samuel opened the discussion on 1 April by warning that economic predictions by Deutsche Bank that this global crisis could well be the third largest economic reduction in the last 100 years, with a 6.5% drop in GDP, compared to only a 4.2% drop in 2008-9. She said this could well put the economy into recession if not a depression and said the fiscal backdrop was likely to be very different once the immediate crisis had passed. Samuel asked if taxes would have to sharply increase as they did after the Second World War?

Dr Gerard Lyons said the Government response to this pandemic needed to be ‘unconventional, unlimited and urgent’. Where the 2008-9 crisis was largely a western financial crisis, this pandemic is obviously global and does not respect national frontiers. In 2008-9 the solution was financial first then macroeconomic, with this COVID-19 crisis, the initial solution was a health one and a macroeconomic solution would follow when Governments would need to look to boost the global economy again. He observed that the action in 2008-9 was global, with this crisis many countries are more ‘on their own’ in terms of their varied responses and he added the G20 forum that met virtually at the beginning of the crisis had been ‘left wanting’ in its response.

Dr Lyons said the consensus was a possible economic recovery in the fourth quarter of 2020 and added while there was ‘no ideal policy response’ he did think there was agreement on the scale of the problem.

He added the Government accepted the collapse in demand and income and was seeking to minimize and offset that lost income and to ‘provide liquidity and ensure financial stability’ to make sure the hit to the economy was temporary and not permanent.

While initially the Chancellor said his measures would be ‘timely targeted and temporary’, Gerard Lyons said it was now clear the Treasury’s actions were ‘coherent, coordinated and comprehensive’.

He accepted, as many politicians and commentators have been saying, that more still needs to be done to assist the self-employed, adding that delay to them receiving any financial help until June was ‘problematic’ and said it was likely that more resources had to go into Universal Credit to assist the increase in applicants.

Dr Lyons said it wouldn’t be advisable to ‘burden the corporate sector with more debt’ so suggested that more grants should be offered in place of loans. Big companies were still not paying suppliers quickly enough, which is a traditional problem for small firms and even more serious now. He said it was important for Government to ensure as many companies as possible survived this shock and came out on the other side of the crisis. He also dispelled the myth about a magic money tree and said the Government was perfectly able to manage its debt through the debt management office.

Former Bank of England Governor Lord King said there were lessons to be learned from the banking crisis of 2008. He gave the example that banking system then was running right up against the margins and didn’t have sufficient capital to absorb losses or the ability to raise liquid assets; we now see the NHS will need additional capacity to be ready to cope with this pandemic. He urged all concerned to ‘avoid bogus predictions’ especially given it was very difficult to know how long the lockdown measures were likely to be needed.

Lord King added there needed to be ‘collective insurance’ from the Government to all affected and that nobody should blame the private sector for this when it is a Government decision to ‘lockdown the economy’ and ‘push down on economic activity’.

As a result of this, Lord King said the Government had to ensure cash flow to all businesses ‘large and small and the self-employed’ and agreed with other panelists that it was ‘not good enough’ to make the self-employed wait until June without any tangible support. He was also concerned about the ‘mechanism of delivery’ for this Government support if most bank branches were closed and unable to support businesses. Banks either by phone or in person had to be open to ensure the Government-backed emergency loans that were available in principle were ‘available in practice’.

Lord King concluded that the Government needed to find an ‘exit strategy’ to avoid a ‘rebellion against the lockdown’ the longer it is sustained, and added that as a result of this crisis the Government needed to support the NHS to ensure it was better able to ramp up the number of intensive care beds and for the NHS as a whole to be more robust and resilient.

Former Treasury Permanent Secretary Lord Macpherson said overall the Government and the Chancellor had ‘done a good job so far’ in this crisis but it was clear that more was required.

He noted that the social security system was likely to be put under more strain to help the ‘poorest in society’.

He echoed other panelists in pressing for a credible exit strategy and said the key questions was ‘How do we pay for this crisis and how do we come through it stronger?’.

Speaking as a former Treasury civil servant, he said it was critical to strike the right balance between ‘taxation, borrowing and printing money’ and suggested that the time might now be right for Government to consider a health tax to cover the cost of demographic pressures on the NHS and funding additional capacity.

Former Chancellor Lord Darling said the COVID-19 pandemic is different from the banking crisis of 2008 as there is no way of seeing the scale of the problem or knowing how long it will last.

He was clear that the Government message on testing up to this point had not been clear but said only a huge roll out of testing would ensure the NHS could get back on to the front foot in tackling the virus and this would also establish who has the virus and who has had it and is likely to be immune.

He said the delivery of the measures announced for the self-employed would take longer to deliver than many people have got, and this was not helped because people were finding it difficult to get access to the banks or information they required. Reflecting on his own time in Government in the Blair and Brown Governments, he suggested a temporary VAT reduction could be one solution to boost the economy and added national governments needed to ‘work as never before together if we are going to get through this’.

When questioned about the impact the crisis would have on national transport infrastructure projects like HS2, Lord Darling, as a former Transport Secretary, said Government should focus on delivering small ‘shovel-ready projects’ rather than huge and costly projects likely to take many years to come into use, like HS2.