People who have been put on universal credit get huge delays in receiving their payments, especially if they take short-term work and then the contract finishes, this has been an issue for a while. The DWP/HMRC systems aren't suddenly going to have become blue chip now this new scheme is around. Remember as well that HMRC will be down on workforce due to staff sickness, and also they have little spare capacity left from the projects to set the customs systems up for dealing with the end of the Brexit transition period: that deadline won't move, and if those aren't set up we really will have chaos in January.
The measures the government announced were all good ones and popular but the true test will be on the capacity of the state to administer it. There will be some Tory ministers now who wonder whether it was wise to have spent all these years slashing headcounts, outsourcing functions to dodgy private companies, and attacking the civil service as part of the "culture war".
The next 2 years at least as going to see this government face a number of very challenging problems for which they will be reliant on a super-effective government machine to deal with: first the virus, then the disruption that will come from the end of the transition. This could easily see the same or worse shortages in shops because if it's not super-smooth at the borders we'll have gridlocked roads, disruption to supply chains and we've already seen how vulnerable our supply chains are to panic buying when there isn't a supply shock. The additional bureaucracy to administer the extra trade costs will be huge and this hasn't sunk in to a lot of people. Business representative groups have been raising concerns with the government for a while but the ones who shouted the loudest got sidelined by government for not being positive enough about Brexit. Before Brexit happened, they could dismiss these business groups as Remoaners who wanted to overturn the result but the problems they raised will become reality next year.
After a while, people will become tired of living in perma-disruption. They will know the virus isn't the government's fault but if disruption continues next year after the end of the transition when the rest of the world is returning to normality they will be angry and their anger will be focused on the competence of the government. At first they might be able to divert blame to the civil service/EU but the question is, ok, how are you going to sort it out. Just culling a few Permanent Secretaries and appointing your own yes-men won't solve problems of this huge complexity, you really needed to invest in the government machine before. If they go on more culling of headcounts in the civil service it might cheer the base but it won't solve the problems and in the end it comes down to people expecting a level of competence from the government.
Boris probably thought once Brexit "got done" he could be throwing around all this extra money saved from not paying in to the EU to improve the NHS and do all his "levelling up" of the regions, and offer some tax cuts to keep middle England happy, whilst pointing at Starmer and saying this guy will lead us to having a second Scottish referendum! Instead he's going to be consumed with firefights. I bet with hindsight he would have not launched his leadership bid last summer. Would have been better to have sat this out as a personality carping from the sidelines at Hunt/Javid/Gove instead.
He could have been doing interviews now saying "of course we need to do something about the virus...but taking away the essential freedoms of our great citizens is not the way!"
