The Eat Out to Help Out scheme, the “rule of six,” and the local tier system introduced in England between August and October 2020 were not assessed by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the UK Covid Inquiry has heard.
During an inquiry session on 19 October, Catherine Noakes, chair of SAGE’s environmental modelling group, revealed that the group had not been asked to consider the implications of the Eat Out to Help Out scheme.1 SAGE was meant to give advice to support government decision making during emergencies.
Under Eat Out to Help Out, which aimed to support hospitality businesses reopening after the first lockdown, the government covered 50% of the cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks consumed on the premises of participating businesses, Monday to Wednesday, from 3 to 31 August 2020.
“Had we been asked, I think we would have had a concern that encouraging people to get together indoors—and only on three days of the week, which perhaps encourages crowding—was not necessarily a well designed approach,” said Noakes, professor of environmental engineering for buildings at the University of Leeds.
John Edmunds, a member of SAGE who gave evidence, said that the scheme angered him. “I’m still angry about it,” he said. “It was one thing taking your foot off the brake, which is what we’d been doing by easing restrictions, but to put your foot on the accelerator seemed to me perverse. And to spend public money to do that when 45 000 people had just died.”
The pub and restaurant sector could have been supported by “just giving them money,” he said. “This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk.”
Although Eat Out to Help Out alone was not responsible for the second wave of the pandemic, “the optics of it were terrible,” he said. “There was a change in people’s behaviour in August, and I wouldn’t say that it was Eat Out to Help Out but it was contributing. Government messaging more generally was about getting back to normal and going back to work.”
With cases of covid-19 rising, the government introduced the “rule of six” on 14 September 2020 banning gatherings of more than six people indoors or outdoors to try to reduce transmission. A three tier system for setting local restrictions—medium, high, and very high—was then implemented from 12 October, with a more severe fourth stay-at-home tier added on 19 December as cases continued to rise dramatically in some areas.
Edmunds, professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was asked by Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, whether SAGE had recommended or discussed the rule of six or the tier system before their implementation. “No,” he replied.
Ahead of the introduction of these two measures, on 10 September SAGE asked Edmunds to chair a working group to review existing and new non-pharmaceutical interventions and “come up with a batting order” for deploying them to reduce incidence of covid-19, hospital admissions, and outbreaks in care home—all of which were rising.
The working group came back a week later and recommended several interventions. These were: a circuit breaker; advice to work from home for all those that could; banning all contact in the home with members of other households (except support bubbles); closure of all bars, restaurants, cafes, and indoor gyms; and all university and college teaching to be online unless face-to-face teaching was essential.
“The circuit breaker was about reducing the prevalence and bringing it to a low level,” Edmunds said. “And the other measures, which were for a longer term, were to slow the growth.”
The recommendations were to be discussed at a SAGE meeting on 21 September but Edmunds was asked to attend a meeting with Prime Minister Boris Johnson the day before. In an email to Edmunds then Government Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance said that the meeting with the prime minister was “for him to hear a range of views on the forward look (mainly from the ‘let it rip’ brigade).” He added, “I think what he needs is your view on the future direction of the epidemic rather than policy options.”