UK jobless rate climbs to 4.9 pct as redundancies hit record high
Source: Xinhua | 2020-12-16
The British unemployment rate surged to 4.9 percent in the three months to October 2020 as redundancies reached a record high amid effects caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the British Office for National Statistics (ONS) said Tuesday.
An estimated 1.69 million people were unemployed in the three months, with 1.2 percentage points higher than a year earlier, figures showed.
"Latest ONS's data confirms that coronavirus continues to weigh heavily on the UK jobs market," said Suren Thiru, head of economics at the British Chambers of Commerce.
Meanwhile, redundancies across the country reached a record high of 370,000 in the period, with an increase of a record 217,000 on the quarter, between May and July, data revealed.
Thiru said that the tightening restrictions and the cliff edge caused by the original furlough scheme end date helped push redundancies to a record high.
While Howard Archer, chief economic advisor to the EY ITEM Club, an economics forecasting group in Britain, said despite a weak reading overall, "the weakness is less than feared".
"This suggests the extensions of the furlough scheme (firstly to the end of November and then to the end of March) started to have some limiting impact on job losses," said Archer.
"The EY ITEM Club predicts that the unemployment rate could rise to 7.0 percent during the first half of 2021," Archer said.
In Britain, job losses at fastest rate on record as economic recovery from first lockdown loses steam, and the second wave of COVID-19 is pushing the country's economy to the brink of a double-dip recession, according to a Guardian analysis.
To bring life back to normal, countries, such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States, are racing against time to develop and approve coronavirus vaccines.
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