Footing the bill

At the beginning of the month I mused at reference 1 about our inability to talk about how we were going to pay for coronavirus in a mature and adult way.

This morning I had another go at this. Starting with an article from the Guardian included in my Microsoft news feed. From there to the NAO, where I find there is a great deal of information, so we are a mature democracy as far as that goes. See reference 2.

The headline figure seems to be that we have spent or committed £210bn so far. They provide a breakdown in both as a PDF (reference 2) and as a downloadable CSV file. So I now have my very own Excel spreadsheet containing all this stuff, getting on for 200 lines of it, arranged in 12 columns. Not very big or complicated in the scheme of things, so maybe I will be able to work out how it all adds up to the headline figure. But that is clearly something for mañana, as they say in Spain.

For the moment, let us suppose that this is the right number and that it is all new money. Not money which has been found by postponing or abandoning other spending.

Suppose also that the UK contains 50m tax paying adults.

My arithmetic says that this means that our solidly elected government has spent on coronavirus, on our behalf, about £4,000 all in per tax paying head, including here mistakes, errors of judgement and commission to friends. All of which is going to happen when you spend a lot of money in a hurry.

If we then suppose that around half of tax paying adults are either too poor to be able to pay tax or too cute to get caught by the tax man, the rest of us have to stump up around £10,000 a head, perhaps spread over the next two or three years. Which does not sound so terrible. So when is our Chancellor going to start the ball rolling?

Reference 1: psmv4: Mature democracy.

Reference 2: COVID-19 cost tracker - National Audit Office (NAO).

Reference 3: COVID-19-cost-tracker-2020-09-08.pdf (nao.org.uk).