A further 1m people will lose their jobs by the end of the year, with chancellor Rishi Sunak’s new work support scheme failing to stop a wave of redundancies that will hit young and low-skilled workers the hardest, economists predicted on Friday.
Mr Sunak said this week that he hoped the scheme would benefit large numbers of people by helping businesses that were “open and operating but with depressed demand” to keep employees in jobs on part-time hours after the furlough scheme ends next month.
But economists warned that Mr Sunak’s new measures would not be enough to counteract the effect of new Covid-19 restrictions on economic activity, and that the wage subsidy would make no material difference to their estimates of the likely surge in unemployment.