I think this is the key question, the government has had months now to work out a decent financial support package for the most affected industries and individuals. I've not seen any sign that they're doing anything in the past couple of months other than lobbing a few quid at theatres / concert venues etc.
I don't think they can be criticised for the initial introduction of furlough, that was the right measure at (more or less) the right time. They now need to be thinking about the financial support that's needed in some areas to allow them to be put on pause to prevent the spread of the virus without sending them to the wall.
Instead of dropping £100,000,000,000 on testing 10 million people a day, or continuing to throw contracts at their pals and the likes of Deloitte and Serco I'd say the solutions are actually quite simple (and probably quite cheap compared to the proposed £100bn on testing):
- Sort out testing capacity so that anyone who needs one gets one (plus also fix the tracing part in England)
- Sort out full pay for people who are told to self isolate
- Get testing sorted for people who are arriving into the country - if Italy can test everyone with results in 30 minutes I don't see why we can't
- Conduct an industry by industry review to see what financial support is needed to keep them alive
If 1-3 are done well I don't think 4 needs to be particularly expensive - if the background prevalence of the virus is low then we can open up quite well - the restrictions over the past couple of months haven't been particularly severe, I think most people can live with them.
My theory is that the reason infections are going up just now is because we've done such a poor job of 2&3, and 1 is now falling over too. Based on the numbers as they were last month, the number of people who should have been told to self isolate was probably way less than 100,000, but even if we assume it was that amount, and each of them were given £2,000, that's still only £200m. That's a drop in the ocean (0.2% of the proposed spend on testing) compared to the other costs of handling the pandemic. Instead of which we've forced people into a position of having to choose between putting food on the table or self isolating. You could give every pub in the land £100,000 and it would still only cost half of what they're proposing to spend on 'moonshot' testing!