For the Excluded community, today’s findings from the Covid Inquiry will make for uncomfortable reading, but they won’t come as a surprise.
During the pandemic, the Conservative Government repeatedly justified excluding 3.8 million taxpayers from financial support, labelling them as a fraud risk.
Time and again, ministers insisted that widening eligibility would leave the schemes open to abuse.
That argument became the excuse for one of the greatest acts of financial discrimination seen in modern Britain.
Millions of taxpayers were abandoned, not because they had done anything wrong, but because they fell outside arbitrary Treasury rules. Company directors, freelancers, PAYE workers who had changed jobs, newly self employed people, maternity returners, contractors and many others were told, in effect, that they were simply too risky to help.
Many lost businesses they had spent years building. Families exhausted savings, sold homes, relied on food banks or accumulated crippling debt. Some never recovered. Others are still living with the consequences today.
And while all of that was happening?
The Covid Inquiry has now concluded that almost ÂŁ10 billion of the ÂŁ14.9 billion spent on PPE was wasted.
It has criticised the so called VIP lane that gave suppliers with political connections privileged access to Government procurement, finding that it created an unfair process and undermined public confidence.
Utterly sickening and wholly unacceptable!
Ordinary taxpayers, people who had paid into the system for years, were viewed as the potential problem.
Meanwhile, billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money were being handed out through procurement processes that have since become synonymous with waste, poor judgement and preferential treatment.
For years, those who were excluded were made to feel as though they were asking for something they had not earned.
They were not.
They were asking for the same protection offered to millions of other taxpayers during a national emergency.
Instead, they became collateral damage in a Treasury policy that judged entire groups of people unworthy of support.
The passage of time does not lessen that injustice.
The Government has changed. Ministers have changed. Yet the discrimination experienced by the Excluded has never been properly acknowledged, never mind remedied.
Every new revelation about pandemic procurement, every new report detailing wasted public money, every new criticism of decisions made at the heart of Government raises the same uncomfortable question.
If there was money for contracts that ultimately delivered little value, if safeguards could be relaxed for politically connected suppliers, if billions could be written off without meaningful accountability, why was there never any willingness to find a fair solution for millions of legitimate taxpayers?
The Excluded did not fail the country.
The country failed the Excluded.
That remains as true today as it was during the pandemic.
Justice delayed is justice denied. For millions of excluded taxpayers, that justice has still not arrived.
