The unemployment figures make for grim reading especially for the Chancellor Rishi Sunak, employment fell and unemployment rose to 4.8% and there is far worse to come. A recent documentary I presented on this subject pointed out that hundreds of thousands of people who think they are on furlough are actually unemployed. They just haven’t been told yet.
There was evidence of that in these latest figures, which seem to have seen a very sharp increase in unemployment because firms saw the furlough scheme was coming to an end; only for the Chancellor to extend it at the last moment. It was just too late a move to save everyones’ job; which is really something he should have seen coming.
That is a reminder that there is more to having a good crisis than being the first to throw money at the problem; which Mr Sunak did and by most accounts did well. Once the initial crisis becomes the norm, there also needs to be some longer term thinking and real initiative. Many firms I have spoken to were, for instance, furious that the furlough scheme had no provision for training. They either had to keep staff at work or at home; when they would have loved to have taken the opportunity to retrain them, at Government expense, to take advantage of the new digital economy.
The Treasury missed that chance, which is a crying shame because the state of training in this country is not good and with the apprenticeship system and further education colleges both in dire straits; it is probably an investment it is going to have to make in the near future anyway.
It also suggests a wider problem, that in this covid crisis the Government has been reacting to events and not planning for them. Winston Churchill, the PM’s hero, famously used to write “Action this Day” on vitally important papers and also demand that he be told what action had been taken and whether it had worked.
It is a proactive and time consuming way of managing the most short term and vital problems but less credit is given the fact that at the same time his Government dealt with numerous complicated long term issues. Aircraft production, the allocation of materials and workers to best support the war effort, international finance and global military strategy to name just a few; oh and they managed to commission the Beveridge Report as well.
I am sure you can all think of more important things the Government could have used this crisis to improve, reform or just do better, but training is top of my list.