Commentary & Podcasts

Retail banks have been at the heart of the UK’s economic response to the coronavirus pandemic: supporting the nation to manage its money through the terrible personal and financial costs the disease has wreaked – from payment holidays through to bounce back loans. Now, banks have a new role to play. Not only in supporting economic recovery, but in ‘building back better’: resetting the balance between generating investor returns and serving community interests.

The past year’s public health crisis has provoked an extraordinary economic intervention by the Government. Only the most diehard of free market advocates have decried the approach. Instead, there has been a wide recognition, right across the political spectrum, that if the economy is to weather these unprecedented circumstances, ideology must be firmly set aside.

The Coronavirus crisis has affected us all, although not equally. Experiences of the last year depend considerably on where in the country you live, your ethnicity, gender, the nature of your job and the type of business in which you work.

This blog reflects on our recent SMF Ask the Expert event, held in partnership with UK Research and Innovation, exploring the impact of the pandemic on vulnerable children.

Is the Government overestimating its ability to “double down on levelling up”? Professor Philip McCann – one of the UK’s foremost economic geographers – certainly thinks so.