It is a pandemic. There is no reserve of uninfected, refreshed people.

I suspect a part of the reason for the call is to communicate that we are not in normal times and the idea of paying someone to make your problems go away doesn't work. Help or get out of the way, your payment will be a slightly less broken country when this is past.

Inspiring words. I wish yours was the topmost comment on this post.

It’s a global epidemic. The NHS is funded to run all of these services, but not when 1.5 million people have been asked to shield themselves.

They're actually not funded to run these services. Before this crisis the NHS was routinely failing to meet minimum standards.

Then supply more funding. People are being made redundant, this should not be just for a person that is boring being inside.

The Government is providing 80% of your pay to anybody not able to work. Self-employed measures are being announced soon. Redundancies are limited in comparison.

Instead of or as well as doing that, they could pay people for volunteering to help the nhs. The other measures you mention are very costly in comparison.

Capitalism isn't the answer for everything we encounter in life. Being human is sometimes required.

Compensating workers isn't Capitalism. Compensating owners is.

Maybe they don't want the overhead of interviewing and taking on full employees expecting long-term employment at this time. I don't know if UK employment laws allows this (they are pretty strict) but perhaps they can issue a stipend for temporary volunteers who show up consistently.

These workers should fall under the same classification as other "gig economy" workers like Uber drivers. Whatever the relevant labor laws are in the UK, the government should be subject to them also.

it should be, it isn't properly, we can try and fix that after we have helped people.