£4.9bn lost on Bounce Back Loans alone, as the Public Accounts Committee calls out Tories’ chaotic COVID spending

At the time of the pandemic, Crawley Borough Council were threatened by the Government with being named-and-shamed for carrying our basic fraud checks on grants being made by the council, but we took the decision to call their bluff. Public money isn’t ours to waste.

Instead, the Tories’ £400bn of taxpayer money spent on COVID-19, it is clear that much which was loaned or paid out to ministers’ mates for unusable PPE will never be regained. Around £4.9bn on Bounce Back Loans alone is unrecoverable.

Every pound lost is money out of taxpayers’ pockets and out of vital services ranging from our NHS to pothole repair.

Instead of threatening councils, the Government should have followed Crawley’s examples and introduced basic checks for business loans to prevent people cheating the system.

As things stand, the Government has no clear plan for tracking ongoing COVID-19 costs or evaluating COVID-19 schemes in the longer term. In refusing to learn from their mistakes they not only abrogate their responsibility for them, but make a repeat of the whole episode inevitable.