There is now an article on the ITV news website.
Rishi Sunak has abandoned his hope of ending the top-up £20 payment at the Budget on 3 March, Robert Peston writes. | ITV National News
www.itv.com
The main point of the article is that the £20 uplift to Universal Credit is going to continue for another 6 months.
It says that they
may tie this extension in with an extension of the furlough and self employed suppoet schemes, but that this isn't a given.
Later in the article it says that there would be a sharp rise in unemployment if all the support schemes are withdrawn at the end of April Take note of the last sentence in the article about 500,000 people in Scotland on Universal Credit, and how it would be a gift to the SNP if the £20 uplift was withdrawn a week before the election. Similarly with all the other elections in England and Wales.
I think this is the point of the extension, rather than an intention to keep the lockdown going for a long time. By this I mean that they want to give the economy a chance to recover once restrictions are removed, before withdrawing the financial support to the most affected people.