Fairness first should be Rishi Sunak’s mission – The Yorkshire Post says

Mr Sunak became the custodian of the nation’s purse-strings nearly a year ago after his predecessor Sajid Javid quit. Within weeks, his swift action to the pandemic assured and protected a great many.

But many of the Chancellor’s interventions from the pioneering furlough job retention scheme to the £20 a week uplift in Universal Credit for the poorest families and support for the hospitality sector were only intended to be temporary because of the cost to the public purse.

And that is the dilemma facing the Treasury – when is it prudent and safe to scale back these initiatives and, as the country teeters on the brink of a double dip decision, when will be the right time to try and regain control of the public finances and come to terms with Covid’s escalating costs?

As such, the advice being offered to the Chancellor, from Labour’s renewed new calls in Parliament to extend Universal Credit and those advocating reforms to other taxes, should be set in this context – what would they cut to pay for their measures if they were in the Richmond MP’s position?

Equally, the Chancellor is in the invidious approach of having to write major Budget for early March when the economic outlook is changing by the day. As such, it is to be hoped that one word – fairness – underpins his decision-making when he decides how and where the tax burden should fall in future.

But he will be unsurprised to read that The Yorkshire Post believes that investment in the levelling up agenda is crucial to reducing the many regional inequalities that have become such a drag on the national economy, and even more so in the wake of Covid.

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