Rishi Sunak’s Treasury blocked giving laptops to poor youngsters at begin of pandemic

Rishi Sunak’s Treasury blocked plans to give poorer kids laptops so they could keep learning at the start of lockdown, it has emerged.

The PM is facing accusations he’s out of touch after he claimed in an election interview he went without “lots of things” as a child including Sky TV.

Now it can be revealed that when Mr Sunak was Chancellor, officials were stopped from buying laptops for disadvantaged children. In documents submitted to the Covid Inquiry, the top civil servant at the Department for Education said a plan was blocked by the Treasury.

Susan Acland-Hood wrote: “In the early stages of the pandemic only the most vulnerable children (children in care) were prioritised for laptops. This was because DfE was, initially, unsuccessful in seeking funding from HM Treasury to go further in the early stages.” She added: “With hindsight, it would have been better if funding could have been secured for a quicker roll out of laptops to all children.”

Hundreds of thousands of children had their teaching hampered during the pandemic as they did not have access to the technology they needed to learn from home. Ms Acland-Hood, who is Permanent Secretary at the education department, said that laptops were eventually bought for a greater number of kids.

In a written witness statement to the Covid Inquiry, she said: “DfE did ultimately deliver over 1.95million devices (enough to close the gap between laptops already in the system aggregate, and the needs of disadvantaged children).”

Official figures show more than 450,000 children struggled to learn at home during the early months of lockdown due to lack of laptops, with single parent families hard hit. A study found more than half of (52.2%) parents said their child found it difficult to study after most schools closed their doors.

Some 8.5% – equivalent of 455,384 people – blamed the lack of devices such as laptops for their children’s struggles, as access to a computer and the internet has proved a key part of home learning. It rose to 20.9% for households with one parent in them, according to Office for National Statistics figures to the end of June 2020..

The figures suggested the poorest families struggled most, with 17.5% of parents earning less than £10,000 saying their children were losing out on studying due to lack of access to laptops.

In an ITV interview, to be screened tonight, Mr Sunak laughed awkwardly as he was questioned on whether he understands the struggles facing ordinary families.

Asked what he had gone without in his life he said “lots of things”. Pressed to give an example he said: “All sorts of things like lots of people. There’ll be all sorts of things that I would’ve wanted as a kid that I couldn’t have. Famously, Sky TV, so that was something that we never had growing up actually.”

Mr Sunak, 44, attended one of the country’s most expensive boarding schools, Winchester College. He and his wife Akshata Murty are the richest inhabitants of Downing Street in history. Their combined £651million fortune put them above the King on the list of the wealthiest people in the country.

The Mirror last year revealed that the couple donated $3million to a mega-rich US college while UK schools scrimp and save to afford even the basics. They paid for a computing lab at Claremont McKenna in California, where the PM’s wife Akshata Murty studied economics and French as an undergraduate. The donation in 2018 came three years after Mr Sunak became MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire.