We can’t let dodgy accounting lead us into a disastrous second lockdown

Tory MPS should force ministers to publish a full cost-benefit analysis for all Covid restrictions

Can you hear that noise? It’s getting ever louder, and it’s the drumroll for another lockdown, here in Britain, of course, but also across western Europe. It is futile to pretend that the virus is not spreading again, despite all of the precautions, restrictions and historic denials of liberty already imposed by the state. The winter will be cold and grim: Sage believes that an extra 85,000 people will die in the second wave, according to a document leaked to The Spectator. That’s its plausible worst-case scenario, as ever, and it could easily be wrong.

But the horrible reality is that nothing any of the big countries has done has worked: the lockdowns didn’t kill the virus and didn’t really buy time to fix anything else; the vaccines aren’t ready and may never work; all health systems are inadequate in surge situations, including the French and German; handwashing, social distancing and masks aren’t enough; Angela Merkel’s luck has run out; we are miles off herd immunity; we don’t have true mass testing; and no Western country has cracked track and trace, a beautiful, technophilic idea that may, in fact, be little more than a 21st-century Maginot Line in an unwinnable war.

Governments across almost all of the Western world are panicking: they have lost control, or never had it in the first place. They look aghast at America, where Joe Biden is about to oust Donald Trump because of Covid and his reaction to it, and they fear that they will be next. They feel unable to isolate the vulnerable, so they are returning to the one policy they all said they never wanted to resort to again: lockdowns, in a desperate bid to slow a seasonally driven epidemic, send a signal that they are doing everything they can, and hope that something, anything will turn up to save them.

Such internationally coordinated political back-covering isn’t a good reason to shut down again: it merely confirms that the self-interest of ruling elites isn’t aligned with that of the public. Hence governments’ nonsensical claims that the only outcome that matters is reducing excess death rates, which just happens to be the one measure used to rank pandemic performance internationally.

Yet fixating on a single metric in this way stinks of dodgy accounting of the most scandalous sort. It is not just financially illiterate but also staggeringly mendacious to point to only one side of a ledger to justify taking action.

In the real world, there are profits and losses, assets and liabilities, benefits and costs. A company that reported its revenues without accounting for its costs would rightly be chased out of town, yet that is exactly what the pro-lockdown forces are seeking to do.

Yes, shutting down society tomorrow would reduce deaths for a period (though the experience from the first and second waves suggests they would often be merely delayed, rather than actually saved). But estimates of lives preserved represent only one side of the picture, and even then very incompletely.

For a start, it is universally accepted throughout government accounting that not all “lives” are the same: callous as it may sound, in a world of limited resources where terrible choices have to be made, a gravely ill 95-year-old is less worth saving than a five-year-old healthy child.

Government accounting thus uses a concept known as quality-adjusted life years: one QUALY is equal to one year in perfect health, and is thought to be worth £30,000-£60,000. So an honest, competent number-cruncher seeking to work out the upside of a lockdown would compile estimates of the number of QUALYS it would save, and the monetary value. They would plug in the various Sage estimates, as well as other forecasts – not just worst-case scenarios – and produce a range of figures. My own guesstimates suggest a benefit of £15 billion from a winter lockdown, given the age of those affected.

But such calculations cannot, on their own, justify anything. What is on the other side of the ledger? What are the countervailing costs? What will happen to jobs, businesses, families, friendships, hobbies, sports and normal life?

Our honest accountant would put a cost on all of the good things foregone: a year’s unemployment would be worth (say) £20,000, a missed birthday party £1,000, a term’s missed schooling £10,000, a divorce £100,000 and so on. All of these assumptions would be explicitly stated, with explanations, justifications and all the calculations available for audit. My guesstimate is that this number would be bigger than the first, and that a rational observer would therefore judge that the costs of a lockdown are greater than its benefits.

I’m not usually a pure utilitarian, but this situation requires us to return to the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The right course of action, they argued, is to maximise the overall good, defined as the sum of the happiness of everybody in society. We need to promote the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number, and minimise overall unhappiness. Everybody’s utility counts equally: we are not exclusively concerned with those who die, but must also account for the pain suffered by millions from lockdown itself.

If Tory MPS and lockdown sceptics want to make a difference, they should demand that the Government comes clean on the costs of current and future restrictions. They should insist on sound accounting. They should force Matt Hancock to publish a properly researched, comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of all proposals, updated every two weeks. Officials must tell us how many QUALYS they think they might save, and the monetary value assigned to them, and set that against a detailed costing of the economic, social, personal, psychological and other hits from lockdown. Every assumption should be explicit and translated into a monetary sum.

Before any further lockdown is ordered, MPS and the public should be given time to scrutinise and debate all of the numbers, and potentially reject them as inadequate if they are seen to be artificially minimising the downsides. Even with a virus as vicious and complex as Covid-19, sunlight is always the best disinfectant. It’s certainly our last chance to avoid a catastrophic winter.