In an attempt to win tomorrow’s vote on the new tier system — without relying on Labour’s support — Boris Johnson promised to publish analysis of the health, social and economic impact that the new tier system would have on the nation. But potential rebels are unlikely to be satisfied with the resulting document, published earlier this afternoon.
The intention was to show sceptical MPs that the government is seriously weighing up the trade-offs between the effects of Covid and the effects of stopping its spread. But it did not include a rigorous economic analysis of the tier system: in fact, it provided no cost-benefit analysis of any specific restriction.
Instead of estimating the impact of the tiers, the document doubles down on claims that such an exercise would essentially be impossible:
Due to the range of factors that need to be considered, and that in many cases are difficult to estimate — including how the virus would have evolved in different scenarios — any attempt to estimate the specific economic impacts of precise changes to individual restrictions for a defined period of time would be subject to such wide uncertainty as to not be meaningful for precise policy making.
It is difficult to see how this appeases the MPs who are driven by economic concerns
The ‘uncertainties’ laid out in the document include unknowns around ‘the path of the virus in the UK, including the effectiveness of and compliance with restrictions across the four nations’ and ‘the path of the virus globally and the approach to restrictions in other countries’.
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