Lockdown – Reflections at the end of week 61

Many years ago, I drove up to Aberdeen for a wedding. On the way, I stopped off in Montrose, which, for those of you who have never had the pleasure, is a town on Scotland’s East Coast, around two thirds of the way from Edinburgh to Aberdeen. I got into a conversation with a shopkeeper there who told me that there were two seasons in Montrose, they being winter and July. As I write this piece today, it feels like a major and undetected shift in the Earth’s crust has taken place and that Suffolk now occupies the place recently vacated by the county of Angus. The wait for summer to show the merest hint that it’s not a myth has been long. In a reassuring moment, the swifts whose acrobatics and calls fill the air above my garden in summer arrived with commendable promptness at the start of this week, although they have spent the last few weeks flying up from Africa, so won’t have had notice that the weather here is not what they have come all that way for. On the other hand, the St George’s Day mushrooms which usually pop up in my grass around, you’ve guessed it, late April, have only just made an appearance a month late.

Confusion and the consequences of rain, wind and below average temperatures have had an impact on this week’s lockdown related events. It is not surprising that many people living in Britain are unenthusiastic about betting on the weather improving enough to deliver a warm and sunny staycation. The green list countries comprise Portugal (filling up rapidly with tourists) and, largely, places that won’t let us in yet or which have extensive quarantining requirements on entry, places that make Montrose look like a tropical paradise and volcanic plugs thousands of miles from anywhere that are only accessible through military transport or via red list countries. Small wonder then that people, with the encouragement of Ryanair and other high profile players in the travel industry, are looking to holiday in familiar and warm amber list countries. Since 17th May, it is no longer against the law for them to do so, an active choice made by the Government which was under no compulsion to do so. Yet the Government, having granted that freedom, has told people that they don’t expect them to use it. I’m not sure that all that many people either understand the approach or are taking all that much notice of them.

Elsewhere, and less confusingly, retail figures have bounced back and, whilst the High Street has not been overwhelmed, there has been a perhaps predictable drop in the market share of online retail sales. The nation, it seems, has been keen to update its wardrobes with sales of clothes and shoes being particularly strong. This may also reflect more people returning to work in offices having to replace with something more formal than the pyjama bottoms and slippers which work for Zoom calls but don’t work when you have to leave the house. There has also been a rise in inflation, which briefly spooked the stock markets but which economists feel pretty comfortable with at the moment.

So back to confusion, and a potential cure for it. When British Rail was privatised, the technique used was a little like taking a very large fine china vase, hitting it with a sledgehammer and then gluing it back together again. As we have seen, through various failures, including awful accidents, the refusal of some franchises to work economically in any train operator’s hands and the insolvency of Railtrack, the repair job was flawed. As travellers, we have seen crowded trains, fares which can be bewilderingly high or low and odd rules that apply to which train to your destination you are or are not allowed to board. The reform of the railways announced this week represents an acknowledgement of those flaws and that the current system makes it almost impossible to use rail transport effectively as part of an integrated and environmentally improved transport infrastructure. It’s not quite a renationalisation given that trains will still be operated by private companies, but it will give the Government a much greater opportunity to control what goes on. It’s in all our interests that they use it well.

And then to confusion which is brewing. The Government’s has spoken of education as an important element in its levelling up agenda. This week, however, the Local Government Association is suggesting that a change to the date which is used to assess the pupil premium, which provides extra funding to provide academic support for less well off pupils, (a change aimed, it seems, to—at helping certainty of budget planning), will see a shortfall in funds which would otherwise have been available of around £118 million. It’s hard to see how levelling up can be effectively delivered if need, rather than ease of budgeting, is not at the top of the agenda.

I hope my swifts have brought their umbrellas with them this weekend as I reap the bonus of being let off by wet weather from having to mow the meadow which is encroaching on my back door. Enjoy your weekend, whatever you’re going to be doing.

Expert
Ian Waine
Senior Partner