UK unveils new pandemic support for workers

(Representative photo)

Britain’s finance minister yesterday unveiled measures to help people find jobs after the government came under attack for ending a furlough scheme that kept millions employed during the pandemic. In his debut in-person address to the Conservative Party’s annual conference as finance minister, Rishi Sunak announced the government would extend programmes created during the outbreak to get people into work. His ministry said the full package was worth £500mn and would include retraining older workers coming off furlough and younger Britons. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has spent almost £70bn on paying the bulk of wages for staff stuck at home, helping to keep the official unemployment rate relatively low. But the furlough scheme ended last Thursday, which Sunak accepted would lead to job losses, while a weekly boost to benefits for the lowest-paid workers was also being scrapped. The chancellor of the exchequer insists that it is time to transition to longer-term support, against objections by opposition parties and campaigners that the changes will plunge many people deeper into poverty. “I said right at the beginning of this crisis, it wasn’t going to be possible for me or quite frankly any chancellor to save every single person’s job,” Sunak told Sky News. However, he said during his speech the government’s actions during the pandemic had protected 11mn jobs. “Forecasters were predicting unemployment to reach 12%,” he recalled of the early days of the lockdown, when he said “it really did feel like the world was collapsing. The forecasts were wrong. The unemployment rate is at less than 5% and falling. “It wasn’t that the forecasters had bad models. “It’s just their models did not take account of one thing, and that was this Conservative government and our will to act,” he told the conference in Manchester, north west England. Now the focus was on “providing the support and skills people need to get into work and get on in life”, which depended on putting public finances “on a sustainable footing.” Addressing the fiscal conservatives in the audience, Sunak said he wanted tax cuts, but that the “recovery comes with a cost” that needs to be repaid. Many analysts therefore expect Sunak to raise taxes after he sets out a budget review in late October, as the Treasury battles to balance the books after its huge pandemic spending.