Why unemployment rate stable at 3.9% first 6 months of pandemic?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the unemployment rate in the UK stayed stable at 3.9%, which was not just in the initial days, but all the way to last month. The unemployment rate did not change for the last six months, and pre-pandemic as well. Most of the people in the UK were seeing the number of people losing their jobs increasing but the unemployment rate staying the same, which made it look like a lie, but to the greatest extent, the numbers were not wrong. There are various reasons why the unemployment numbers did not change, and some of these are.

It can be agreed, companies were letting go of their staff in large numbers which shows that there were a lot of people losing their jobs, but the unemployment rate did not change. The main reason for this was that a significant portion of these people was not looking to get back into the workforce anytime soon.

People were quite hesitant about working again mainly since they wanted the virus to get better, before taking a risk and getting back out there, when they should have been staying at home. Unemployment is defined by the number of people who are out of work and looking to get back into the workforce, which was not the case. 

Another reason for this was the various schemes that the Government was running, including their most popular furlough scheme. According to the scheme, they were giving companies 80% of the salary of their employees so the company only had to pay the rest of the 20%. Their reasons were to prevent the large scale laying off of these people. The scheme single-handedly kept a large number of people within their companies, while the companies could not afford to pay them their salaries. 

The information gathered, and the statistics and reports put together usually took about three months. In the initial stages of the pandemic, compiling these details were a lot tougher since there were a lot of people out of work, and gathering the information was challenging. The first two reports to come out during the pandemic comprised the information gathered in the past, well before it.

Everything considered, the unemployment rate slowly began rising toward the beginning of September and is currently at 4.1% in the UK. 

With all these changes, companies were not sure if they knew the people they were working with since a lot of the regular faces might not have been there any longer. The changes implemented were once followed for the longest time, but not to the degree that they were now.

Employers and businesses began making background checks mandatory to assist companies with knowing the people they were hiring. There were multiple types of tests that they could work with, and the simplest and most popular one was the CRB check. Anyone who wanted information on another person could conduct this test.

The facts would be gathered and provided after paying a fee. However, if a company wanted more information, like criminal records and whether the person they were selecting for the job got along well with others, they could handle a DBS check which was a little more complex, done by employers, and applied for online, making it a convenient option.

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