The UK's unemployment rate has risen to 4.8% in Q3 2020 amid another wave of job cuts owing to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Photo: Scottish Government
The labour market has been affected by the news of the furlough scheme coming to an end, and the government's eleventh-hour announcement of its continuation.
The government announced that the furlough scheme is set to extend until the end of March as they prepared to send the nation into a four-week lockdown that went into effect last Thursday.
Before this announcement, UK chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a new Covid stimulus package to replace the existing scheme which was abandoned in favour of extending furlough.
Redundancies climbed to record highs during the pandemic, with the latest figures estimating 314,000 between July and September, a rise of 181,000 from the previous quarter and 195,000 from the previous year, according to a report by the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
The UK's employment rate was 75.3% for Q2, with 32.51 million people in active employement - 247,000 lower than the same period in 2019.
The employment rate of young people has also reached record lows, dropping to 3.52 million people between the ages of 16-24 currently in active employment.
According to the ONS data, men have also been hit harder than women, with male unemployment at an estimated 5.2% for the three months leading to September with female unemployment sitting at around 4.2%.
Both figures have risen significantly from the same period last year.
The number of people on company payroll saw a slight decrease of 33,000 between September and October, although numbers are still 782,000 below pre-pandemic levels.
Employee growth increased based on previous data, owing to people returning to full-time work after several months on furlough, however the numbers shown are still way below the levels they were before the lockdown, with annual growth of 1.3% and total pay growth of 1.9%.
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