With rising energy bills, fuel prices, and inflation on many consumer products, there is a lot of uncertainty for the predicted 1 million people that were left on the Furlough Scheme after it ended yesterday. The scheme helped out roughly 9.6 million workers over the last 18 months and cost the government £70bn pounds, a fifth of their covid spend!
The Government has now announced a half-a-billion pound programme to provide support to people, that most need it over winter. The programme will help three or four million vulnerable families with £100 or £150 extra a month which should provide much-needed assistance through the difficult and uncertain times ahead although it will by no means plug the gap that furlough, in conjunction with other market factors, will leave.
So are mass redundancies on the horizon? Or will many workers find their pay or hours reduced as employees struggle to recover?
Many think that with the furlough scheme ending, the approximate one million job vacancies currently in the UK will be filled. I believe, as a recruiter in the Consumer sector, the end of the furlough scheme won’t drastically change where the sector is today, largely due to many furloughed staff already having been active over the last 18 months and trying to look for a new role. However, there are other industries such as air travel that have been affected massively by the pandemic, where there will not be options to reabsorb furloughed staff and redundancies will be either looming or already in process. Can we really expect all these individuals to change their career paths in order to plug existing UK vacancies?! We definitely have some interesting months ahead of us…
The government’s £70bn furlough scheme, which began in March 2020, ended on Thursday, leaving many uncertain about their employment futures.
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