Second Labour MP suspended over Covid loan repayments

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   Second Labour MP suspended over Covid loan repayments

   BBC NewsPublished Oct 20, 2026Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “Perran Moon has referred himself to be investigated A second Labour MP, Perran Moon, has been suspended over Covid loan repayments, after voluntarily referring himself for investigation. Moon, the MP for Camborne and Redruth, is listed on Companies House as the co-director of a training company called Autoswot , external , which last filed accounts in June 2021. Government Bounce Back Loans of up to £50,000 were made available to support small businesses during the pandemic, but a government report found the scheme was vulnerable to fraud and error. In August, Labour MP Bayo Alaba was suspended after queries about a Covid-era loan, and a third MP, James McMurdock, quit Reform in 2025 after questions about eligibility for loans he received. Bounce back loans worth a total of £46bn were issued when the scheme was launched in May 2020, making it the biggest of the government's pandemic-era loan schemes. Each one had a 100% government guarantee, meaning taxpayers' cash was used to pay back banks if the companies failed, but the Covid counter-fraud commissioner later found total fraud and error estimated at up to £2.8bn to the public purse. Autoswot had been set up in June 2019, a year before the loans became available, and at that time had forecast revenues of more than £200,000.”

2. 2

   A very British state capitalism: Variegation, political connections and bailouts during the COVID-19 crisis.

   Environment & planning A (Wood et al.)Published Feb 14, 2022Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “Rapid progress with vaccines notwithstanding, the UK government's response to COVID-19 has been associated with much controversy, not only because of an extraordinarily high death rate, but also because of allegations of cronyism around the granting of government contracts and bailouts. We focus on the latter, investigating more closely who got bailed out. We find that badly affected sectors (e.g. hospitality, transportation) and larger employers were more likely to get bailouts. However, the latter also favored the politically influential and those who had run up debt profligately. Although, as with state capitalism, crony capitalism is most often associated with emerging markets, we conclude that the two have coalesced into a peculiarly British variety, but one that has some common features with other major liberal markets. This might suggest that the eco-systemic dominance of the latter is coming to an end, or, at the least, that this model is drifting towards one that assumes many of the features commonly associated with developing nations.”

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   Has previous loan rejection scarred firms from applying for loans during Covid-19?

   Small business economics (Cowling et al.)Published Dec 18, 2021Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “Previous loan rejections have not discouraged small businesses in the UK in applying for Covid-19 government-guaranteed loans. Banks have used the loan guarantee schemes to continue to supply loans to small business during the pandemic. Our paper analyses the important phenomenon of borrower scarring and discouragement, when potential debtors are self-excluded from the lending market because they have previous rejections or expect a negative bank response. We consider around 45,000 UK small businesses from 2018 to 2020. On the demand side, we find that the economic shock for small businesses during the pandemic dissipates the scarring effect. Specifically, we find that micro and small businesses had the highest loan demand in the first two quarters of the pandemic (from March 2020). On the supply side, we show that scarred borrowers were not routed onto Covid-19 government-guaranteed loan schemes. These findings show the importance of government-backed lending schemes for small businesses during crisis period.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11187-021-00586-2.”

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   Payment integrity in government programs: Takeaways from incorporating the behavioral sciences in US federal evaluations.

   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Duru et al.)Published Jul 6, 2026Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “The low-cost, evidence-based interventions draw on insights from the social and behavioral sciences and include modification of forms, changes to how and when agencies request information, and altering existing communications. The evaluations were conducted by the US General Services Administration's Office of Evaluation Sciences in collaboration with agency partners. We extract three takeaways across four representative evaluations. First, the real-world evaluations validate a key implication of the behavioral science literature: interventions that reduce burdens for individuals have small effects that meaningfully improve payment integrity at scale. Second, effects attenuate across interventions and over time, suggesting a need for iterative evaluation. Finally, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative complexity are the main barriers to translating academic insights into real-world government programs. Addressing these challenges will require close collaboration between behavioral scientists and practitioners throughout the intervention design and evaluation process.”

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   British government response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Wikipedia)

   WikipediaChecked Oct 20, 2026

   “In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, the British government introduced various public health and economic measures to mitigate its impact, many of which applied only in England. Devolution allowed the UK's four nations to each have their own responses to the pandemic; the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive introduced different policies. Numerous laws were enacted or introduced throughout the crisis. The UK government had developed a pandemic response plan in previous years. In response to the first confirmed COVID-19 cases in January 2020, the UK introduced advice for travellers coming from affected countries in late January and February 2020, and began contact tracing, although this was later abandoned. The government incrementally introduced further societal restrictions on the public as the virus spread across the country in the following weeks, initially resisting more stringent measures introduced elsewhere in Europe and Asia.”