UK facing huge rise in jobless rate, despite latest measures

CHANCELLOR Rishi Sunak has been warned his latest emergency package will not be enough to prevent the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs from sectors hardest hit by coronavirus.

Conservative peer Lord Wolfson, the chief executive of Next, said roles will be shed from the retail industry as consumers make a permanent shift to shopping online. And shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds warned unemployment was heading towards “1980s levels” despite Mr Sunak’s wage subsidy package, as official figures showed borrowing continued to soar and new local lockdowns were announced.

Steve Barclay, who is Mr Sunak’s deputy as chief secretary to the Treasury, defended the measures as being targeted to roles that remain “viable” but warned “we cannot save every job”.

Sectors hardest hit by the restrictions in place to slow Covid-19’s spread continued to raise warnings despite the Chancellor’s Job Support Scheme to help pay wages for employees able to work at least a third of their hours.

Lord Wolfson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the seemingly permanent shift to online shopping means that a lot of “unviable” jobs are in retail.

Asked if a lot of those roles are in retail, he replied: “I think that is right. I wouldn’t want to underestimate the difficulty that is going to cause a lot of people who work in retail.

“I think it’s going to be very uncomfortable for a lot of people. We will inevitably, and have already, reduced the number of people working in our shops and I’d expect that to continue over the coming five or six years as the demand for retail goes down.”

The British Retail Consortium warned an estimated 130,000 retail jobs had been lost since January, a number they fear could nearly double by the end of the year “despite recent interventions by the Chancellor”.

The influential Resolution Foundation think tank warned the “winter economic package” would not stave off a spike in unemployment.

Chief executive Torsten Bell said Mr Sunak was right to announce fresh support but added “design flaws mean that the new Job Support Scheme will not live up to its promise to significantly reduce the rise in unemployment”.

“Those mistakes could be addressed by scrapping the poorly targeted £7.5 billion Job Retention Bonus, and using those funds to ensure the new support scheme gives firms the right incentives to cut hours rather than jobs,” he added.

Ms Dodds said the “million-dollar question” is whether the wage support scheme will fail to incentivise employers to keep people on as she sounded the warning of further mass job losses.

“Certainly those unemployment levels are rising very substantially, they’re going back towards 1980s levels,” the Labour MP told Today.

Mr Barclay said it was “very sadly” the case that there will be more unemployment as a consequence of coronavirus but that support was targeted at getting those in “viable” jobs back to work while the unemployed can be retrained. The Chancellor has been very honest that we cannot save every job, but what we need to do with these measures is target our funding on jobs that are viable,” he said.