District Matters

Different impacts of COVID-19

March 2020

There is only one subject to write about at the moment and that is the impact of COVID-19.

The impacts are severe at a number of levels:

• At the individual level, where one may be infected. This has especial relevance for the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions.
• At a family and friends level, where if partners, relatives or friends are in the vulnerable category then extreme care has to be taken with contact.
• At a social level, where social distancing means that social interaction will reduce significantly.
• At an economic and business level, where the impacts are happening almost immediately and will be very substantial.

The reality is that we are pretty much in uncharted territory. It is unprecedented in peacetime for countries to go into ‘lock down'. Normal flows of trade and travel have ceased and it is uncertain how long this will last.

As a Council we are now working out how we adapt and play our part to reduce the spread of the virus. Obviously we cannot cease operations. Our first key step is to put in place the capability for as many people to home work as possible and then maximise the number of people doing this. We recognise that not only do we have to stay open but we have to be seen to stay open. Our main reception and contact centre will remain manned and, on Monday we decided to keep the Visitor Information Centre open. After all, tourism is our second biggest industry. On Tuesday we decided that, given the massive reduction in the number of visitors, we would close it. This is an indication of how fast things are changing.

We then intend reducing to an absolute minimum the number of meetings that need to be held. One of the issues we have is that legally people have to be physically present at decision making meetings. We have been told that the law will be changed, this week, so that people will no longer have to be present. This is particularly important for Planning and Licensing meetings. We will be putting the technology in place so that these meetings can operate using remote technology. We have cancelled all council meetings until the end of March which gives us time to understand what we can and can't do.

We are taking actions and making decisions step by step. In part this is because we need decisions and guidance from government and in part because we are testing our thinking on options so we attempt to ‘get it right first time'.

In the short term the main issues will be around social care and people deemed to be vulnerable. Social care is the province of Warwickshire County Council. People thought to be vulnerable to COVID-19 are estimated at between 1.2 and 1.7 million. A lot of the support needed will be done by community groups, we will need to think through and consult on where and how we can add value.

What is a major concern is the longer term economic and business impacts, and some of these will manifest very quickly. We anticipate that hotels and the hospitality industry will begin to shed staff, probably starting this week. We also anticipate that retail will be even harder than it has been. In short we expect redundancies and short-time working to become more significant very quickly. In the slightly longer term we expect that many more businesses will be hit by either lack of demand or supply chain issues.

We believe that as the COVID-19 crisis continues then there will be an increasing number of people with council tax arrears and issues with their rent. This may mean an increase in workload and the implications will need to be considered.

We understand that we, as a council will be responsible for implementing the proposals on business rates and the hardship fund as announced in the budget. This will be another load on us at a challenging time. We are awaiting government guidance on how we have to implement these. We have still not had any formal guidance or instructions from last week's business rates budget announcements let alone something that was announced at 6pm on Tuesday 17 March.

Overall we are preparing as best we can for a journey into uncharted territory. We have focussed on the most urgent issues and have identified those that can be considered later yet, still before they really impact.

In the longer term we will need to be thinking through how we help the District recover and prepare for the ‘new normal' from mid-2021 onwards. I think we have to be clear that the ‘new normal' may be very different from the pre COVID-19 normal. We all will need to adapt.