News / Economy

UK unemployment rate rises to 5-year high after year-long Covid-19 pandemic

Tuesday, 23 February 2021 2:23 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 23 February 2021 5:24 PM ]

The big rise in unemployment is unsettling news for the ruling Tories especially after Boris Johnson's promise yesterday of full emergence from the lockdown by end of June

As the UK prepares to emerge from intermittent year-long lockdowns and associated coronavirus restrictions, the scale of the economic challenge ahead is slowly coming into sharp relief.

In the latest negative economic news, it has emerged that unemployment rose to 5.1 percent between October and December 2020, marking a 5-year high point.

According to the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 726,000 British workers have lost their job since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

This constitutes the biggest jump in unemployment since autumn 2015.

To make matters worse, almost 60 percent of the people who have become unemployed since the beginning of the pandemic were under 25-years old.

Jonathan Athow, who is the deputy national statistician at the ONS, asserted that the rise in unemployment was the highest since the “financial crisis” (2007-2008) and had affected younger workers the hardest.

Reacting to the latest negative economic news, Chancellor Rishi Sunak could only express sympathy with those workers affected by saying “every job lost is a personal tragedy”.

Sunak added he’ll set out his “plan” for jobs and broader recovery plan for the “remainder of the pandemic” at the “Budget next week”.