Rishi Sunak is about to start unravelling his most popular economic policy – and the public won’t like it

The chancellor’s coronavirus job retention scheme has won a label that ministers would normally give their right arm for: it has proved too successful. Some 6.3 million workers have been furloughed, many more than expected

Public trust in the UK government has risen from 36 per cent to a remarkably high 60 per cent since January, the biggest jump in the 11 countries surveyed in PR firm Edelman’s “trust barometer.” Around the world, the coronavirus crisis appears, for now at least, to have transformed what people think about their national leaders.

Yet Boris Johnson can’t afford an ounce of complacency. The coronavirus effect might be due largely to a desire for people to “rally round the flag” and hope their leaders succeed in a crisis – a natural reaction, given the threat to life.

Indeed, other polls show support for the government’s handling of the pandemic has fallen in recent weeks. According to YouGov, the proportion of people who believe government has handled it well has dropped from 72 per cent to 61 per cent. For ORB International, the fall is from 68 per cent to 52 per cent. Opinium found approval for the government’s response at its lowest level since just before the lockdown.

The worry for Johnson is that, despite his hailing the government’s “apparent success”, its ratings will likely fall further amid grim headlines about the UK having the most deaths in Europe; the tragedy unfolding in care homes; continuing problems with personal protective equipment and growing evidence that the lockdown and “test, track and trace” strategy came too late.

There’s another reason why the public’s views will change. Its current support for the government is based heavily on strong backing for chancellor Rishi Sunak’s intervention to save jobs – but he is likely to unwind it next week.

The job retention scheme has won a label that ministers would normally give their right arm for: it has proved too successful. Some 6.3 million workers have been furloughed, many more than the Treasury expected. This inevitably means the cost is much higher than estimated. So far, the bill is £8bn, but it could rise to between £40bn and £50bn. The Treasury is getting jittery. “This cannot go on indefinitely. It’s time to start thinking about the impact on the public finances,” one source told me.

Preparing the ground, Sunak told ITV News: “We are potentially spending as much on the furlough scheme as we do on the NHS, for example. Now clearly that is not a sustainable situation.” He promised there would be no cliff edge when the scheme is wound down.

The chancellor’s options include reducing the 80 per cent wage subsidy to 60 per cent; cutting the £2,500-a-month maximum payment; special help for “Generation Rent”; and closing the scheme for some sectors at the end of June while continuing it for those, such as hospitality, likely to remain in lockdown for longer.

Sunak should consider a more flexible scheme, allowing furloughed workers to work part-time, which would help companies meet social distancing rules as they bring their staff back into offices and other confined workplaces. He should bring in wage subsidies for younger workers. As the Resolution Foundation warns today, an extra 600,000 18- to 24-year-olds in the “corona class of 2020” face unemployment in the coming year, inflicting long-term damage on their pay and job prospects even if the economy recovers. The think tank proposes new maintenance support for young people to encourage them to stay on in further and higher education and job guarantees for those entering the labour market.

Sunak should tread carefully. If he moves too quickly, the wave of redundancies he has prevented might just happen, defeating the purpose of his scheme. But Treasury officials fear privately that some furloughed workers will not have jobs to return to anyway, and so want to bite the bullet.

Many employees are not ready to go back to work because they don’t feel it’s safe to do so. Ministers cannot leave it up to companies to provide “safe working”; they should impose sanctions on companies that put their workers at risk. The trade unions, which are raising wholly legitimate concerns about safety, are already being cast as the bad guys by the Tory MPs in the “economy first” brigade. They, and ministers, should reflect on that depressing European league table and Edelman’s other key finding, that 73 per cent of people say the highest priority should be to save lives – even if the economy will sustain more damage and recover more slowly.

After his remarkable rise from obscurity to potential future prime minister, Sunak is about to discover that the public might be briefly grateful for your occasional sweeties, but they are far more likely to remember your administration of an unpalatable medicine.

The chancellor should remember his own mantra when first unveiling his jobs scheme: “This is not a time for ideology and orthodoxy.”