Redundancy fears in Tameside once furlough ends

30,000 people have been furloughed in Tameside but bosses fear a 'large chunk' will be made redundant once government cash is withdrawn.

The furlough scheme was introduced in March to support people unable to work during lockdown, and has since protected more than nine million jobs.

The state has been paying up to 80pc of the wages of workers who would otherwise have been laid off at a cost so far of £25 billion.

It is due to end in October, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned there can be no further extension despite a wave of job losses across the country.

The chief executive of Tameside council Steven Pleasant told a meeting of the governing body of the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) that they fear large numbers of people will be laid off in the borough once the scheme ends. 

He queried whether they have enough ‘resilience in our systems’ for a second surge of the virus.

“What we do is we’ve got the non-health impact of Covid coming at us as well,”  he said.

“We saw it in terms of the level of destitution that was presenting to the humanitarian hub, but we’ve got 30,000 jobs that are furloughed in this borough that are going to be un-furloughed into the coming period of time in the autumn.

“And I suspect a large chunk of those will end up being redundancies. 

“So we’ve got a lot of stuff coming at us around poverty and demand like that and all these things need to be being built into our assumptions around what living with Covid actually means for this health and care system.”

On July 1, as part of the new ‘flexible furlough scheme’ the government announced that companies would be able to bring furloughed employees back to work on a part-time basis, with the state paying 80pc of their salary when not working. 

As lockdown lifts further, from August the level of government grant provided through the job retention scheme will be limited and employers’ contributions will rise.

By the end of October employees will have to be paying a fifth of a furloughed employee’s salary.

But MPs have called for the scheme to be extended beyond the autumn over fears that that there will be significant jobs losses once it is withdrawn.

Main image:

A view of Ashton-under-Lyne. Photo: Charlotte Green LDR.