Rishi Sunak announced that the furlough scheme, unprecedented in its scale and cost, and aimed at saving millions of jobs as the lockdown was imposed, is to be slowly wound down.
From August, employers will be asked to share the burden borne by the government to pay workers’ salaries – and it will come to an end in October. Mr Sunak promised to kick start the economy, so that – as he put it, “the hum of activity will return”.
But that is a distant reality for those businesses likely to be feeling the pinch of the pandemic for many months to come, and who fear that as the economy is taken off life support, they will struggle to survive.
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