Recommendation 17

There were also consequences arising from insufficiently granular knowledge about small businesses within the departments. We asked officials about the way that scheme designs and initial versions of guidance were unable to provide clarity about whether or how a range of business types were covered.31 This lack of clarity prompted questions from businesses, local authorities and MPs that the government struggled to answer in a timely fashion. Guidance had to be revised or Frequently Asked Questions published, multiple times.32 HM Treasury told us they did their best to manage “dozens of complicated edge cases”; DBT pointed to improvements in late 2021 but accepted that “in the early phases of the crisis, the connection between the policy making and the delivery information was not as strong as we would have liked it to be.”33 DBT gave “wet-led pubs” and “substantial meals” as examples of categories that were ambiguous or needed clarification.34