Over 1m Britons in limbo as govt. winds up furlough scheme
Saeed Pourreza
Press TV, London
The UK government has scrapped a job retention scheme that helped keep people employed since the start of the pandemic. The country’s unemployment rate stands at nearly five percent at the moment but many forecasters, among them the Bank of England, are expecting that number to rise as more than a million Britons are now at risk of being laid off.
It was the biggest state intervention in the UK's labor market since World War II introduced 18 months ago to help firms weather the economic storm whipped up by the pandemic.
Popularly known as the furlough scheme its cost a whopping 94 billion dollars. Without it, there are concerns that the job market will be flooded as job seekers need to find employment.
Launched in March last year, the Scheme was the brainchild of British Chancellor Rishi Sunak, covering 80 percent, of a furloughed employee’s wages.
When it started it helped save more than 11.6m jobs. 18 months later, it was still supporting well over a million of them. The government is hopeful that the more than a million job vacancies will absorb workers coming off furlough. Critics say the decision to wind up the scheme will only intensify Britain’s economic trouble.
But it's not just the ending of furlough that is a concern among Britons. A temporary increase in welfare payments universal credit and a moratorium on evictions for renters squeezed by the pandemic are also ending in October at a time when consumers are facing a 12 percent rise in energy costs.
And all of that at a time when the country’s economic recovery from Covid-19 is faltering. For the people of Britain, there’s no doubt an autumn storm is on the way.
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