13:44

Of all the ministers who have been given the opportunity to appear at the government’s daily coronavirus press conference, Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, has probably made the best impression. Of course being able to announce almost limitless government spending does help a lot, but he is less evasive than most of his colleagues and generally does a better job than the rest of them at sounding positive yet not deluded.

He managed it again today, even though some of his assumptions are verging on the heroic. The OBR does broadly back his claim that the economy will be able to recover quickly. But his suggestion that Boris Johnson’s open-chequebook “levelling up” agenda will be able to survive intact after the national debt has risen much higher seems optimistic, to put it politely. And perhaps his boldest claim is that this is no inherent tension between safeguarding the economy and protecting lives. That argument might look robust now, but it is likely to appear more tenuous in the months to come.

Here are the main points.

Sunak insisted that the UK economy would be able to recover “quickly and strongly” after the coronavirus crisis was over. He made the claim in response to a report from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggesting a three-month lockdown, followed by three more months of partial lockdown measures, could shrink GDP by 35% and put unemployment up by more than 2m. Sunak insisted that this was not a firm forecast, but he accepted that the economic impact of the crisis would be significant. However, he claimed recovery could come very quickly. He said:

This is going to be hard, our economy’s going to take a significant hit and as I’ve said before that’s not an abstract thing, people are going to feel that in their jobs and in their household incomes ... Yes it will be difficult in the short term. I’m happy to be honest about that with people. I think the measures we’ve put in place will help and then as we get through this it will mean that we can recover quickly and strongly and get our lives and economy back to normal.

Improbable as this claim may seem, it is in line with the OBR analysis, which envisages that says that “real GDP falls 35% in the second quarter, but bounces back quickly”.

Sunak rejected suggestions that the coronavirus crisis, and the enormous increase in government borrowing and debt that it will generate, would prevent the government from pursuing its “levelling up” agenda (which prioritises infrastructure spending, particularly in the north). When this suggestion was put to him, he replied:

Once we get through this obviously we will have to take stock of public finances and the economy and make the right decisions at that point and I’ve talked before about doing whatever we need to to right the ship at that point. But what I would say is we remain very committed to the agenda that we set out before which was about levelling up and spreading opportunity around this country, and indeed I believe this can still be a critical part of how we get back to normal here.

He rejected claims that there was an inherent contradiction between protecting the economy and saving lives. In his opening remarks he said:

The third point I want to make is this: right now, the single most important thing we can do for the health of our economy is to protect the health of our people. It’s not a case of choosing between the economy and public health – common sense tells us that doing so would be self-defeating. At a time when we are seeing hundreds of people dying every day from this terrible disease, the absolute priority must be to focus all of our resources … … not just of the state, but of businesses, and of all of you at home as well, in a collective national effort to beat this virus.

He refused to back a call for the government to scrap the pensions “triple lock” as a result of the crisis, to free up money to help young workers who are particularly likely to be disadvantaged. The Social Market Foundation, a centrist thinktank, has proposed this idea. Asked if he agreed, Sunak said he would not write his budget now. But he said he wanted to provide opportunity for people, whatever age they were.

He said the government was working with the ONS to speed up the publication of information about the deaths of people with coronavirus in care homes.

He said that the coronavirus job retention scheme is due to open on 20 April.

He said he would consider making some of the coronavirus business loans 100% guaranteed by the government, not just 80% guaranteed. George Osborne, a former Tory chancellor, has proposed this idea. (See 5.40pm.)