Can Britain avoid mass-unemployment?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Bank of England says unemployment could approach 10 per cent this year and as the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme is wound down, many economists are warning it could go even higher.
With more than a quarter of the UK workforce already on furlough, what can be done to make sure they have jobs to go back to?
David Aaronovitch examines the government’s options and hears who is most vulnerable.
Contributors:
Melanie Simms, Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Glasgow
Laura Gardiner, Research Director at The Resolution Foundation
Alan Manning, Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics
Tony Wilson, Director of the Institute for Employment Studies
Producers: Beth Sagar-Fenton, Kirsteen Knight and Joe Kent. Editor: Jasper Corbett.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.4 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David O'Ronovich. |
| 0:09.6 | The briefing room is the space where in 28 minutes, |
| 0:12.8 | people with genuine expertise explain to people without, |
| 0:16.5 | that's you and me folks, |
| 0:18.2 | what they need to know about a big issue of the day. |
| 0:21.7 | This week, post-pandemic unemployment. |
| 0:32.5 | In Britain right now, it's likely that between a third and a half of the working age population isn't |
| 0:37.9 | actually working at all. Millions of us are furloughed, paid while we can't work, but that |
| 0:44.4 | scheme is due to stop later this year. As the furloughs end, we'll see a surge in unemployment. |
| 0:51.1 | So today, I want to know how bad it's likely to be and for whom. What lessons can we |
| 0:56.1 | learn from history? And what could the government do about it? Step inside the briefing room and |
| 1:01.4 | together we'll find out. First, some history. The coronavirus pandemic may be unprecedented, but crises leading to high unemployment |
| 1:13.1 | are not. What can past recessions tell us about our work-deprived future? Melanie Sims is |
| 1:20.2 | Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Glasgow. If we look at periods of increasing |
| 1:26.4 | unemployment in the recent past in the UK, there's two that are particularly interesting. |
| 1:31.2 | One is immediately after the financial crisis in 2008 and the other was in the 1980s. |
| 1:42.0 | I was at school during those periods of very, very high unemployment in the 1980s and I was at school during those periods of very, very high unemployment in the 1980s, and I was |
| 1:48.1 | fascinated even then by thinking about, well, what makes someone more or less likely to be unemployed? |
| 1:55.0 | It was always presented as a really scary thing in the public discourse. My grandparents lived in Coventry, which was being really |
| 2:02.5 | badly hit during those times. It was also, of course, a time when the miners were on strike as |
| 2:07.1 | well. How long do you think you have to stay out? As long as it takes. As long as it takes. I did |
... |
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