Rishi Sunak’s Job Support Scheme may represent the most ambitious programme to socialise or nationalise work in British history – because at a time when so many companies face bleak demand for their goods and services, it subsidises employers to put their staff on short hours, or turn them into part-time workers, as an alternative to sacking them.
The Treasury is not publishing estimates of how many employees will be on the scheme over the six months of its existence. But its designers ‘guess’ that there may up to four million people on it – which would cost the Exchequer around £1.2 billion a month or £7.2 billion in total.
On the basis of my research for a film about the looming unemployment crisis – which airs this evening on ITV at 7.30pm as part of the ‘Tonight’ series – I suspect this may be an under-estimate; I have lost count of the number of employers I’ve met who are desperate about the future and equally desperate not to sack staff, if at all possible.
To be clear, the scheme applies to everyone – on furlough or not – on the basis of the contracts they were on yesterday.
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