Ben Lowry: Most workers face hardship and many face ruin, but non frontline public sector is unscathed — and that can’t go on if lockdown stays

A week later, everyone in JPI Media,the News Letter owner, was told a pay cut was being imposed.

No-one was surprised by the chief executive David King’s announcement. Other media groups had already done the same, and furloughed (suspend staff on 80% pay) more people than JPI did.

In our case, no-one earning £18,000 has had a pay cut, and above cuts were graduated all the way up to the top, with Mr King and the best paid executives losing 20%.

No-one was thrilled about the cut but I heard no complaint. We respected the symbolism of the tiering, so that the best paid lost most.

We all knew it was due to a health crisis. People would shop less and buy less, including newspapers (since when we have expanded home delivery — there is a link below on how to get the service).

It is now seven weeks since onset of lockdown. We have all learned a lot since then about Covid-19 and the impact of measures to halt it.

One thing I have learned is a concept of Total Harm Minimisation, which means measuring the entirety of harm after a certain course of action. For example, forcing people to stay home might stop Covid-19 but cause other problems that are as bad or maybe worse. So you need to measure all costs and benefits.

That will take years of careful examination of data. No doubt when results emerge not all the experts will agree on what they mean.

My own emerging sense is that this first wave of the virus is nothing like as bad as it might have been, that this is not just due to lockdown – and that even if it was, the unintended consequences of lockdown might be as bad as the benefits.

But that is only my sense [possible reasons why are given at the end of this article]. We all make our own judgments. My point in this column is the utterly uneven way that people are suffering from lockdown.

This is nobody’s fault — no-one planned for restaurants to be destroyed and supermarkets boom.

No-one decided that some people would be stuck in flats, and others in houses with large gardens.

But if this is going to go on and on, and some politicians almost scold us when they imply it will, then we need a new concept called, let us say, Total Harm Distribution.

At present the economic harm distribution is wildly unbalanced.

One long-term solution is to have a careful look at who is paid what.

Most people think low paid key workers get a raw deal and there has been cross-party awareness of this. The 1997 Labour government brought in a minimum wage, the 2010 Tory-Lib one boosted it (from £5.93 in 2010 to £8.72 now).

It is easy to call for rises, but who pays for it? In an ideal world white collar workers, people like journalists in an office, might face a pay trim to help fund manual workers.

But if this crisis goes on another subset of issues must be addressed.

Leaders of private companies are taking big pay cuts, so perhaps public sector leaders and politicians will too? Many of the latter say lockdown (ie financial ruin) is here to stay in the short term.

I have written unpopular articles suggesting we pay politicians more (see link below), to attract talent. But there could be a temporary symbolic cut.

And what about the swathes of the public sector who are unscathed by this crisis, while almost everyone else faces some sacrifice? Few civil servants are frontline.

In the same way that lists of essential businesses were drawn up, perhaps the same should be done for frontline NHS and key staff, who get a temporary bonus, while non essential public sector have a pay trim to help the national effort.

There have been problems getting technology so that all civil servants can work at home, which is understandable given global demand on laptops, but it does suggest that some people have been at home for weeks on full pay. I put this to Stormont – they say that the “vast majority” are “working in line with latest guidance” (their reply is in full below).

It was political cowardice that Stormont went ahead with the teacher a pay rise, while sending out signals that schools will not reopen until September, and possibly only in a phased way even then.

Memories are fading of the financial disaster in the 1970s, when unions dictated pay, leading the UK to the International Monetary Fund.

Meanwhile, appeal judges in Belfast last week put pressure on the attorney general to hold yet another inquest into a Troubles death where state failure is alleged (on top of the others which will cost £100m+).

When people and businesses face ruin and when key workers are risking their health amid a shortage of protection gear, some of this taxpayer-funded expenditure is merely an insult.

But some of it is an outrage.

• Some reasons to be concerned at the grave harm of lockdown:

There are, according to the Office for National Statistics, 3,000 unexplained excess deaths per week, in addition to 9,000 excess Covid deaths — a total of 12,000 excess deaths, which means deaths that above the average for a typical week at this time of year. It might ultimately be that the non Covid deaths are of people who are notably younger than the Covid patients who are dying, who have an average age of 80+, and many of whom were already gravely ill. We can speculate on about five likely types of non Covid deaths caused by lockdown:

• Suicide (let’s hope that will be rare and it might even decline in a time of communal sacrifice — the French sociologist Durkheim in the 1800s found that it declines in war).

• Premature deaths from chronic loneliness of people who had little social contact before this crisis and now have none, or chronic stress of people who have lost jobs or are confined in an unhappy household (studies already suggested that loneliness and stress can be a bigger killer than smoking).

• Deaths from conditions that are not getting the treatment they normally do: heart, cancer, stroke.

• Deaths from a depression plunging people around the world into poverty, reducing life expectancy. These latter deaths will take many years to show in statistics.

• I asked the Department of Finance if it was true thate some civil servants been at home for weeks on full pay with nothing to do? If so, is it a large number. Are there plans to change that? And if so, how will it change? When?

A Department of Finance spokesperson replied:

“During the Covid-19 pandemic the vast majority of civil servants have continued to work in line with the latest guidance, either attending their workplaces safely or working remotely.

“Civil servants have provided services and support to a wide range of people, including those members of society and businesses impacted by Covid-19. Departments have redeployed staff to deliver priority work.

“The Civil Service have been working over the past two years to change the way it works providing staff with the flexibility to work remotely. Services and working practices will continue to evolve in the future with more digital services coming online to serve citizens ensuring that staff can work efficiently from remote locations.”

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

• Ben Lowry in 2016: If we want better politicians we might have to pay them more

• News Letter home delivery service is expanded

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