Should everyone with a positive Covid test be given £500 to self-isolate?

Some have noted the cost, which could run into hundreds of millions of pounds a week at the current rates of positive tests (more than 280,000 over the past week).

But it’s vital to consider the benefits too. If the payments helped the state to suppress the virus sooner, these payments would be dwarfed by the economic benefits.

In the Office for Budget Responsibility’s downside scenario from November long-term UK economic scarring from high economic restrictions until the middle of this year is 3 per cent of GDP, or around £60bn.

Medium restrictions until Spring would result in no scarring at all. If isolation payments help the government suppress the disease more rapidly and reopen the economy sooner this will almost certainly be an investment that will pay for itself many times over.

However, some have wondered whether a one-off £500 payment could create perverse incentives. Given the size of the payment relative to average wages (the median weekly average salary was £585 in 2019), some low earners might, conceivably, be tempted to deliberately expose themselves to the disease to secure it.

Whether this would be a large problem, given the serious health risks, is debateable.

But if we accept, hypothetically, that it is a danger, what other options are there?

One possibility, as recommended by the Resolution Foundation, is allowing firms to put workers required to self-isolate on the furlough scheme, where the government picks up 80 per cent of the wages up to a £2,500 a month cap.

Yet the problem here is that a minority of employers seem to be unscrupulous. Research by the Royal Society for Arts found that many workers had been pressured back into their workplace, and one in 10 of those doing insecure work, such as zero-hours contracts and agency or gig economy jobs, reported they had been to work within 10 days of a positive Covid test.

So relying on employers might in itself by hazardous. There’s also the problem that only formal employees can be furloughed, leaving out the large population of self-employed.

The trade unions have been calling for most of the past year for the level of SSP to be considerably raised. This would help improve financial incentives, but it would probably not be sufficient on its own as this scheme too is administered by employers.

A comprehensive scheme to support self-isolating workers would clearly need to support both employees and the self-employed. The simplest method of reaching the latter, in the end, might be simply to make the Treasury funds available to councils to distribute £500 to those deemed to be in need unlimited.

“It must be possible to devise something between the current very restrictive [system] and payments to everybody”, says Mr Brewer.

What frustrates analysts is that it’s taken the government so long to start addressing what has been a glaring weakness in the system for almost a year.

“The annoying this is that it’s January now, it’s been going for 10 months and the government hasn’t given this any more thought than they did in the first week,” says Mr Brewer.