The unemployment rate is finally beginning to show in the UK, after staying stable since the beginning of the year, staying constant at 3.9% since January. There were people losing jobs throughout the pandemic, and it didn’t seem like the rate was changing. The Government even began bringing in their furlough schemes so that companies would not have to lay off people in large numbers. While these schemes assisted to some degree, people were still losing their jobs, and they were not sure about what the future held. Since the start of the pandemic, there were more than three million people seeking unemployment benefits in the UK, which seems to be the only proper metric for measuring the number of people out of work. While all these people were out of work, they might all not have wanted to get back into the workforce, which could have been why the unemployment rate did not change much. Finally, eight months in, the unemployment rate moved higher to 4.1% in the UK.
The Government decided that they should open up their economy since the beginning of August and decided that people should start visiting smaller bars, restaurants, pubs and give the economy the tiny boost that it needed. Although there were a lot of people who had been indoors since the beginning of the pandemic, they did visit these places, but it was not enough to assist the economy with the growth that they needed.
Most had seen the worst of the pandemic, with companies and businesses shutting down. Furthermore, they had seen the healthcare system fail on the people of the UK, seeing that it was not capable of supporting the large number of people who needed it at those times. A lot of smaller companies and independent work started picking up. People began working on promoting their talent and began creating art, cooking and spending their time with their close family since there wasn’t much else that they could do. Remote working and moving away from the city was now the new norm. Most meetings, whether internal company meetings or the ones that they had with clients, were handled remotely either through the video conferencing platforms or video calls. Most companies were not used to meetings like this since they were considered unprofessional, but what were they supposed to do, especially with meeting people in person frowned upon.
Another change that was taking place in the UK where the number of companies who began moving to remote working, which automatically pushed for employers to start background checks on the people who worked within those companies. Background checks turned into the norm, especially with a large number of jobs demanding it. Specific job profiles had one of their requirements to be that people with criminal records could not get those jobs and so it was crucial for those employers to make sure that the people they were getting to fill in the spot did not have one. Additionally, some jobs like working in a daycare needed to make sure that the person they were hiring did not have any issues when it came to working with kids, which they could find out through an enhanced DBS check. For all the employers’ basic needs, there was always the CRB check that they could turn to.
