By Ashley Preen
February 24, 2021
On Monday, 22 February 2021, Boris Johnson unveiled England’s four-step program for easing Britons out of lockdown.
Although the rhyme and reason of the plan have been questioned, one thing is for sure: There is a roadmap, and there is hope for businesses to open up again soon, especially those in the hospitality industry that have been nearly decimated by closures since March 2020.
Number 10 revealed a lot of info in his briefing, but the salient points for businesses are as follows:
It’s important to remain cautious and to remember that this government has sent people back into their homes and closed businesses down three times in a row. Whether those decisions were correct or not is irrelevant. The point is that it happened.
Although the roadmap was laid out and has been reported on extensively across the UK, Boris Johnson also said that there was no guarantee that the lockdown would indeed end completely on 21 June.
He said that he would be driven by “data, not dates”. We can only hope that the data received is accurate. As the old IT saying goes: “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. If you feed a computer program rubbish, it will spew out rubbish conclusions.
When watching this eye-opening video, one cannot help but think of that classic tale, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Whether Wolf! is being cried with malice aforethought or simply through terrible transparency and a lack of effective planning, is irrelevant. In either case, you need to be prepared.
So, as desperate as we all are to get back outside, do please keep your head. Promises have been broken before, and the last thing anyone needs is to suffer yet another dip in this emotional rollercoaster we’re all on here in the UK.
Our advice to you in business is to always look for additional streams of income, whether those streams come from your current business or a new one.
Number 10 will be making further announcements related to business rates relief and business loans next week. There have been multiple financial aid schemes released amid all the uncertainty in the last year such as the £4.6 billion in lockdown grants announced in January 2021; the £20 million in grants for SMEs announced in July; VAT cuts for the hospitality sector; the Self -Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS); and others.
As unemployment reaches new highs, relief in business rates and properly incentivised business loans that don’t cripple borrowers might be just the boost required to inject life back into the UK economy.