Britain's finance minister unveiled on Monday 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.
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. However, he said during his speech the government's actions during the pandemic had protected 11 million jobs."Forecasters were predicting unemployment to reach 12 percent," he recalled of the early days of the lockdown, when he said "it really did feel like the world was collapsing."It wasn't that the forecasters had bad models.
But separate indicators point to a growth slowdown, as the country struggles with a supply chain bottleneck and global inflationary pressures that have sent fuel prices rocketing.