With the UK Government making changes and winding down a lot of the support they have been providing companies, Britain could walk into another round of job losses. They are expecting unemployment to keep rising in the upcoming months, which is quite scary for a lot of the people working in Britain. Additionally, people employed at jobs where automation or software can replace them and let go of, while companies cut costs to stay afloat through one of the worst pandemics affecting the entire planet.
While furloughing is holding off some job losses, for now, it’s not yet clear how firms will react as the scheme changes in August and as social distancing continues. Furthermore, the greater fear is that the support they are providing is going to stop around October when almost all schemes begin winding down. The ONS cautioned that the increased number of people claiming benefits might not be as a direct consequence of unemployment, as the Government expanded eligibility for universal credit in response to COVID-19.
To protect itself from such drastic changes, the UK Government decided to start making plans on how they can salvage the situation. One of their solutions was to slowly begin opening the economy and workforce, following the necessary precautions to people could start spending the little money that they had saved throughout the pandemic. They were hoping that the change would begin encouraging jobs within the economy and be a boost to smaller businesses like restaurants and bars. Unfortunately, the way that the Government responded to the pandemic over the last couple of months did not help the people in gaining any confidence among the people. People preferred maintaining social distance and staying indoors over visiting restaurants and bars since they did not want to end up catching the virus. Depending on the healthcare system that wasn’t very trustworthy, based on a large number of deaths that they were seeing was not an option.
People were beginning working remotely, so that they would not have to commute to their offices every day, with work meetings and client meetings taking place over video calls. Most companies that could manage remote working started adapting to it since the pandemic didn’t look like it was going away. Unfortunately, the largest part of the workforce in the UK handled all their work in person, in industries like hospitality, construction, running small restaurants and bars and so on. These businesses could not work from home and had no choice.
Employers in almost all other cases started conducting DBS checks to make sure they could trust the people on their team. Previously, they had the HR department run checks on all the people that worked to make sure none of them had a criminal record. Now, they had to conduct background checks online since meeting people was not ideal, so they went ahead with the
regular D BS check for all of their employees. These checks could only be conducted by
employers on people they were planning on hiring, with their information sent to their email addresses.
