Eat Out to Help Out scheme could return after lockdown

He voiced a hope people will get "out and about" when the time comes to ease lockdown measures.

Some expressed fears the scheme, which saw diners receive a 50 per cent state-backed discount of up to £10 per head during certain days in August, helped to accelerate the second wave of Covid-19.

A study from the University of Warwick last month suggested 8 per cent to 17 per cent of newly-detected infection clusters could be attributed to the scheme.

It also found areas with a higher rate of uptake of the scheme experienced a rise in the emergence of new clusters a week after it began.

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Eat Out to Help Out did help to drive footfall to restaurants, with 100 million meals eaten under the scheme.

Talking to Sky News, Mr Sunak declined to talk about "specific measures."

He said: “More broadly I think it's right when we finally exit this (lockdown) and hopefully next year with testing and maybe indeed vaccines as well, we'll be able to start to look forward to getting back to normal.

“I think we'll have to look at the economic situation then and see what’s the best form of our support.

“And we’ll want to make sure we get the economy going strongly, coming out of this, we want to make sure we support employment, support people going into jobs.

"We want all the people who’ve sadly lost their jobs, we want to help them find new ones.

'We want to get consumers spending again, people out and about.

“So we'll look at a range of things to see what the right interventions are at that time.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson previously concede the scheme may have helped to spread the virus, saying: “Insofar as that scheme may have helped to spread the virus, then obviously we need to counteract that.”

But Mr Sunak told journalists: “I think it’s probably simplistic to look at any one thing. What’s happening here is similar to what’s happening in many other countries.”