If, like me, you listened to the Chancellor’s latest announcement today, about the measures the Government is taking to help businesses survive the current crisis, it may have brought to mind the saying about straightening the deckchairs on the Titanic as it headed for an iceberg.

Having posed outside Downing St with Carolyn Fairbairn of the CBI, the Chancellor announced measures based on the scheme she proposed, which would involve a state subsidy if an employer was able to offer workers at least one-third of their normal hours. The business would pick up the full wage bill for the hours worked by an employee with a subsidy for the non-working hours.

The attraction for Mr Sunak, and hence the announcement, is that it would keep people in the workplace and support jobs that were still viable, if only on a part-time basis. Similarly the extensions in the repayment periods for VAT, CBILS and BBLS loans have the appearance of supporting businesses that continue to struggle.

And so, admittedly, these schemes do undoubtedly meet the Government's usual criteria of appearing to be doing something, whilst being largely ineffective and consigning many businesses to a painful, lingering death.

Because they are full of holes and lack any sort of creative thinking. I almost laughed when he called them ‘radical’.

It is clear that the Government’s underlying assumptions – that businesses will survive (when many won’t), that employees can be put on part-time working when for many businesses this won’t be possible and crucially that businesses will keep employees on part-time rather than sacking part-time staff and keeping full-time employees – don’t stand up to scrutiny.

In his announcement the Chancellor also referred, in passing, to the 2.6m self-employed businesses that have benefited from grants, whilst failing to recognise the huge importance of the remaining 50% of self-employed businesses that have been excluded from the schemes introduced so far and will continue to be. That many of these will fail – because it is apparently ‘too difficult’ to devise a scheme to help them – is inevitable, which is particularly worrying as it is the Country’s small businesses that are largely responsible for new job creation.

I wrote recently about some of the measures the Government should be taking, so I won’t repeat them here, but what we heard today doesn’t go nearly far enough and is a recipe for economic disaster. It will also increase the likelihood of mortgage and rent defaults and the suffering those cause.

…..once again it seems there’ll be a shortage of lifeboats.

Noel Guilford