Rishi Sunak commissioned multiple taxpayer-funded focus groups and polls to craft the message of his planned ‘eat out to help out’ campaign in July 2020, despite keeping Britain’s top medical and scientific advisers in the dark about the plan.
The Treasury negotiated five public service contracts worth more than £2 million during the pandemic from June 2020 while Sunak was chancellor, including the contracts to determine how best to ‘sell’ the hospitality program to voters ‘.
The Whitehall department has resisted attempts to obtain details of the focus groups and polls, but was ordered by the information commissioner to publish almost six weeks’ worth of internal emails, which were released this week.
The documents show that only the day after Sunak’s announcement did someone at the Treasury suggest asking the public if they were concerned about how “eating out to help out” would affect the spread of Covid.
Sunak has denied that the £850 million policy – which gave diners a state-funded £10 discount – caused a second wave of Covid infections, despite research showing that this caused an increase of between 8% and 17%, while the economic benefits of the scheme were short-lived.
The Covid inquiry has found that senior scientific advisers were not consulted before Sunak launched ‘eat out to help out’, leading some in the government to privately call him ‘Dr. Death’ and the Treasury Department called it the ‘pro-death squad’.
At least 184 individual focus groups were carried out over the course of the first four contracts while Sunak was chancellor – with voters in the politically sensitive areas of the east Midlands and West Midlands, followed by the North East, the most frequently targeted.
The documents show that polling for the Treasury in June 2020 showed that only 13% agreed that the government should create incentives for people to spend money on eating out so they can return to normal life, while 39% believe that this should not be a priority.
A week later, Sunak’s team discussed how the plan could be made more marketable to the public. The Ministry of Finance’s communications director, Olaf Henricson-Bell, asked colleagues: “Can we test whether people are more supportive of the hospitality industry if it is presented as jobs?”
In response, Cass Horowitz, a special adviser now working for Sunak in Number 10, said: “If it helps, Allegra (Stratton, director of strategic communications at the Treasury from April to October 2020) has a nice line on this. ‘Eat out, help out’ describes it as supporting the sector/employment rather than just having a good time.”
They also reveal that it was only the day after the scheme was announced, on July 8, 2020, that a Treasury official suggested asking the public if they were concerned about its health impact.
An unnamed official emailed Sunak’s team to say: “We need to test what people think about the health risks of encouraging people to restaurants with EOtHO, for example: which of these statements most reflects your views?
“(1) it is irresponsible of the government to encourage people to eat out and risk increasing the spread of the coronavirus, or (2) too many people’s jobs are at stake – the government is right to encourage people to go out safely.”
On the eve of the launch, three weeks later, an unnamed aide proposed asking a poll whether people thought it was “irresponsible” for the government to encourage people to eat out, or whether, after months of lockdown and with people’s jobs at risk, it was right to do so.
The government’s handling of the pandemic is likely to be back in the spotlight next month, when the inquiry hears from the current Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, who said in private WhatsApp messages in July 2020 that he had “never seen a group of people ”. less equipped to run a country” than those ranked at number 10 at the time.
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Testing the views of the Treasury has always been justified by ministers as an essential expenditure to shape policy responses to the pandemic. However, the majority of questions discussed in the released material related to reporting on government announcements.
In her ruling, the Information Commissioner said: “There is an outsized public interest in knowing more about how the Government used opinion polls to inform policy development around its approach to the Covid-19 pandemic. For obvious reasons, it was a fast-moving area of policy development and there was a clear public interest in protecting the safe space in which that policy development was taking place at the time. That time is now over.”
Labor deputy leader Angela Rayner accused Sunak of using the investigation to “boost his own image” during the pandemic. “Now we know why the Treasury Department fought so hard and for so long against the publication of this material,” she said.
“Rishi Sunak did not see fit to ask the country’s top medical advisers what they thought about eating out to help, but he did spend weeks holding focus groups and polls at taxpayer expense to ask how the plan should be presented .
“That proves what we’ve always feared: Rishi Sunak was passionately concerned about how its introduction would affect his own political position, but he couldn’t care less about what it would do to Covid infection rates.”
The Treasury Department has claimed an internal report in the months after the plan suggested there was little evidence it directly led to a spike in infections. However, this has not been made public.
A spokesperson said: “The Government routinely conducts public sentiment surveys to inform policy development, including during an unprecedented pandemic where the Government has acted to protect lives and livelihoods.
“The eat out to help out policy was seen as part of that work to support the hospitality industry and the jobs that depend on it.”