SR20 confirms an additional £38 billion for public services to continue to fight the pandemic this year, bringing total support for public services to £113 billion in 2020-21, and total spending on the Covid-19 response this year to over £280 billion. However, providing the funding necessary to respond to the virus is the right thing to do: as the OBR set out, “the costs of inaction would certainly have been higher”. This action comes at significant fiscal cost. The International Monetary Fund ( IMF) described these steps as “one of the best examples of coordinated action globally”. Since the start of the crisis the government has taken extensive and unprecedented action to tackle the virus and mitigate these impacts across all areas of the UK. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s ( OBR’s) forecast expects GDP to shrink by 11.3 per cent in 2020 – the largest annual fall since the Great Frost of 1709. The health emergency has been accompanied by unprecedented economic uncertainty and the deepest recession on record. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused exceptional hardship for individuals, families and businesses across the UK. This is another significant step towards achieving the government’s objective of over £600 billion of gross public investment over the next five years, reaching the highest sustained levels of public sector net investment as a proportion of GDP since the late 1970s. SR20 also provides £100 billion of capital investment next year, a £27 billion real terms increase compared to 2019-20. It sets departmental budgets for 2021-22 and devolved administrations’ block grants for the same period, confirming that core day-to-day spending – that is, before taking into account Covid-19 spending – will grow at an average of 3.8 per cent a year in real terms from 2019-20 to 2021‑22. Spending Review 2020 ( SR20) prioritises funding to support the government’s response to Covid-19, invest in the UK’s recovery and deliver on promises to the British people.