Juliet SAMUEL

On a weekday, the main roads through London are usually thrumming with activity. Office workers fill up the parks munching Pret sandwiches. Tourists pile in and out of buses, museums and tea rooms. Out-of-towners huddle under theatre awnings, happily clutching tickets.

Yesterday, days after the economy’s grand reopening, the traffic was light. There are boarded-up shops already appearing on The Strand. Arts campaigners have tied up the closed theatres with mock-police tape. New bars and hotels that opened just before the disaster hit remain closed. The largest groups of people around are construction workers and huddles of the homeless.

Rishi Sunak is doing his best to pep us up. Yesterday, he threw a potential £30billion at the economy – just the latest king’s ransom swallowed up by the Covid recession. The largest share set aside is a bribe for employers to bring workers back into jobs rather than laying them off. But despite its potentially enormous £9billion cost to taxpayers, it is hard to see how a bung of just £1,000 per worker will keep ruined businesses hanging on. The same applies for the combined £3.7billion put towards a scheme for hiring young workers and funding apprenticeships.

The Chancellor faces a terrible trade-off. He can keep perpetuating a fake economy reliant on vast state handouts or preside over the loss of millions of jobs. He may even do both. His spring rescue package effectively nationalised large swathes of the country, generating the only recession in history in which disposable incomes have surged as households can’t find enough ways to spend. But already he is trying to pass the baton back to business.

The problem is that the threat of Covid and further lockdowns have not gone away. Millions of workers are staying at home, cutting off the steady flow of cash into city centre shops, cafes, taxis, restaurants and salons. Some neighbourhood hairdressers don’t have an open slot until September, while their downtown rivals, reliant on office worker walk-ins, are empty and already raising prices to cope.

In other cases, social distancing measures enforce a ceiling on activity.

“Eat out!” the Chancellor said, handing us all a 10 quid voucher like a generous parent at Pizza Express. After some difficulty getting a booking, I took myself off to a restaurant.

For periods, a third of the tables lay empty. Glumly, the hostess admitted that social distancing had cut capacity from 180 meals to 100, a problem that Mr Sunak’s 15-percentage-point VAT cut cannot fix.

Even this may be a peak for the year if virus transmission accelerates again. This week, 239 scientists cited “poorly ventilated restaurants” as a prime example of under-appreciated “super-spreading events”.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor is trying to get the property market moving. He unfroze tenant evictions and slashed stamp duty on most houses, a pernicious tax at the best of times.

But struggling tenants and unpaid landlords are still stuck in limbo until they know whether their jobs exist and the backlog of eviction cases starts to clear. And the limited-time stamp duty cut might push some people into the market, but how many of us want to make life-changing, financial decisions about property at a time like this?

The deal the country took earlier this year was clear. The Government shut down the economy in order to protect public health and in turn it bore much of the cost, with the reassurance that this was all a temporary blip.

Now, it’s trying to undo the lockdown and start drawing back the support, but it hasn’t done enough in the meantime to make us believe the worst is really over.

Some of the risk is outside its control. The inherent danger of contagion means the vulnerable are still in hiding, it is hard to spend money and normal activity can only resume up to a limit. But the ruinous extent of the damage is due to policy and institutional failure.

We still don’t have a functional test and trace regime. Schools remain shut. It is hard to credit the idea that care homes are now safe.

Mr Sunak is trying, but the Chancellor is a bit like a gardener heaping fertiliser onto a stressed plant while burning down the flower bed around it. Until his Government shows it can get the fire under control, it’s hard to feel optimistic for the plant.

‘How many of us want to make life-changing financial decisions about property at a time like this?’