Coronaland: Where commercialism does public service

Earlier this month, the Holiday Inn Express in Stevenage had five homeless people removed as a result of abuse of staff and damage to the hotel’s property. Along with 18 other single homeless people and one family, these five were placed in the hotel in March by East Herts District Council as part of the government’s attempt to solve the spread of the virus among the homeless by moving them into private accommodation. As yet, the hotel has not commented on what happened, but what is obvious from the very inception of the idea is that its staff were in no way equipped to deal with the situation placed upon them. They have no training in social care, they are hospitality industry workers.

Likewise, the homeless community was not prepared either. Living rough takes a brutal psychological and physical toll, it requires adaptation to a completely different, alien way of life. This adaptation must in many cases take a huge amount of rehabilitation to overcome and without it, faced with the hotel environment and interaction with the staff, it is unsurprising that what must have been an uneasy accord eventually broke down. The bitter irony is that the homeless are the people that a market economy has left behind, and yet it is commercialism – private enterprise – which is being asked in this time of pandemic to take on the responsibility of their care.

The case of the Stevenage homeless community is an extreme example of a phenomenon which we are now witnessing as the UK wrestles with the virus. That is, that a number of private companies are being asked to perform tasks for the public good and have essentially formed a kind of pseudo-state, a back-up in a time of overcapacity. Imagine BUPA but the doctors are not qualified. 

This is perhaps most visible in the case of the supermarkets, which are, of course, continuing to provide the quintessential essential service of keeping the population fed. While ultimately carrying on with their commercial reason for being, they have had to implement similar kinds of policies on a micro level to those the government is applying to the nation at large. They are regulating the numbers of people going into their stores, directing their staff to make sure rules of social distancing are enforced and altering their product range to the effect that need trumps choice.

Listening to the Heart radio advert breaks, you will notice that the government’s coronavirus broadcast and Aldi’s own announcement are so similar in tone, content and even the voice of the speaker that, if you had not listened till the very end of each, you could be forgiven for not knowing which was from the state and which was the supermarket. In their role as mini-states, the supermarkets are actually doing very well. For example, they have freed up their home delivery slots in order to ensure that the elderly and the vulnerable get the essentials they need, thereby becoming an unwitting arm of the UK’s welfare system.

But what has gone unacknowledged is that providing a service to the public is not the ultimate goal of these firms, and therefore the current tendency to view them within a framework of heroism and sacrifice is something we should be wary of. In a consumer economy, the demand of the population for goods and services results in the formation of firms to satisfy that demand, but they do so to generate profit. The fact that a service is being provided is, to the cynical eye, incidental. In times of stability when the market is functioning as normal this, despite a number of faults, is not a bad way to do things. Company and consumer rub along alright, happy with what each takes away. But what happens when the government expects, and the people need the firms to prioritise their service?

The UK has already had one nasty shock, as everyone realised that when Virgin stepped up to act as intermediary between the NHS and donations from individuals it was allegedly taking a cut. As far as Virgin was concerned it simply saw a market in the social media challenge nomination and donation craze which has been saturating our Instagram feeds in lockdown and responding to fill a void. Virgin has always done this for everything under the sun including trains, planes and even space travel. But in this case, there was no void to be filled, you could always donate directly, and then the public began to see that commercialism and crisis response are not necessarily compatible.

Right now, companies providing essential services are working in overdrive. They form a crucial part of the system which is keeping the UK economy and the consumer society it underpins on life support during the lockdown. We should be proud of the way our firms are responding – because maintaining confidence in the economy is going be crucial – and be particularly thankful to their employees for the jobs they are doing. But we must ask, when commercialism fails in the public service duties now being expected of it, will the state step in? So far, in the case of the homeless people told to leave the Holiday Inn in Stevenage, it has not. They are back on the street.