More than half of British businesses will have to cut staff numbers when the government’s job retention scheme expires, a survey suggests.
The government’s job retention scheme is paying the incomes of about a quarter of the workforce and has helped to keep a lid on rising unemployment since the lockdown was imposed in March. Economists are warning, however, that many of those people will lose their jobs when the scheme closes in the autumn.
YouGov, the polling company, found that 51 per cent of businesses were intending to make redundancies within three months of the scheme’s expiry. In a survey of 500 employers across the UK, 31 per cent said that a fifth of their workforce was at risk and just over 21 per
