This book was written during the summer and autumn of 2020. The editors asked the authors to consider how austerity had impacted their areas of legal specialism; and, whether this impact had relevance for the challenges likely to be faced as the United Kingdom recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. The significant cost of initiatives such as the furlough scheme, and the tax incentives offered to employers within the hospitality and tourism industries, were at the heart of the authors’ task. The UK seemed poised to incur very significant amounts of debt, which was alarming, given recent history. After the financial crash of 2008, the protections of law had seemed to come a very distant second to economic imperatives. The risk of repeating this pattern was pressing. Thus, the authors were asked to consider what might be fixed, now, before the recovery period began.

As the authors began writing in early summer 2020, it was difficult to anticipate the extent of disruption and trauma that soon was to come. By February 2021, when this book went to press, the death of George Floyd in the US state of Minnesota had led to protests around the world. A second lockdown in the UK had occurred. The pressing concerns about procurement of PPE had not dissipated, but, rather, were exacerbated by concerns over the procurement of vaccines – after months of erratic provision of diagnostic testing. Indeed, ‘exacerbated’ would appear to be the theme of developments over the course of writing this book – whether concerns over paying for the cost of government borrowing, surprise at tight touch Parliamentary scrutiny, worries over educational disparity, anxieties over inequality in all aspects of law, profound disquiet over the enormous toll of the virus – all of the concerns that drove the inception of this book, tragically, have intensified as it was being written. This makes the calls for action found in these chapters even more pressing. The crisis is too profound for it to make sense for scholars to wait until the crisis ends, and then to reflect upon the choices that were made. There will be a time for that vein of scholarship, and the scholarship will be valuable – this moment, however, is different. As the crisis still rages, our hope is to contribute to the discussion of choices that might be made.