By Ben Kerrigan-
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has extended the government’s job retention scheme until the end of October.
Sunak said that the funding would be kept at the rate which offers Britons 80 percent of their wages.
His pledge extends the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme which currently supports more than six million jobs beyond the end of June until October
Sunak’s announcement comes as new figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Tuesday for England and Wales brought the UK’s official death toll to 38,289 up until May 3rd.However, those figures include thousands of deaths in care homes where medical judgement was used to determine the cause of death as Covid-19, without testing.
The data painted a grim picture in care homes, which have been hit hard by the virus.
“Care homes (are) showing the slowest decline, sadly,” ONS statistician Nick Stripe told BBC.
“For the first time that I can remember, there were more deaths in total in care homes than there were in hospitals in that week.”
Mr Sunak has insisted there will be no ‘cliff edge’ to the support, but conceded the scale of the bailouts are not ‘sustainable’.
Lord King urged him to keep the proportion of wages covered at 80 per cent.
‘I don’t think it makes sense to regard this as the major cost of the Covid-19 crisis in economic terms,’ he said.
‘These payments under Government schemes are transfers from taxpayers in general to businesses, it will lead to an increase in national debt (but) we can finance that over a long period, particularly given the very low level of long-term real interest rates.
‘The real cost of this shutdown is not measured by the impact on the public finances but by the lost incomes and outputs in the economy, a cost which is likely to end up as an order of magnitude (though no one can really know this) of several hundred billion pounds. That’s an enormous cost.’