UK coronavirus job losses: the latest data on redundancies and furloughs

Tens of thousands of people are being made redundant in the UK as the coronavirus pandemic stalls the economy.

The economic fallout from the pandemic has plunged the UK into the deepest recession for more than 300 years, as lockdowns, physical-distancing measures and people voluntarily making changes in response to high numbers of Covid infections have a dramatic impact on business and social life.

Businesses which rely more on face-to-face interaction have come under the most strain, with retail, hospitality, leisure and travel companies hardest hit. While there are hopes that a vaccine will enable a faster return to normality, lasting changes are nonetheless expected, with consequences for jobs across the country.

The Guardian has been tracking these redundancy numbers as they are announced.

Furloughs point at more to come

While the UK’s number of redundancies is high, the number who have been furloughed is far higher. More than 9m jobs at more than 1m companies in Britain have been furloughed since the launch of the government’s wage subsidy scheme in March 2020.

The coronavirus job retention scheme has been extended to last until the end of March 2021, after the government made a last-minute U-turn to extend the wage subsidy scheme beyond its original deadline at the end of October 2020.

The support for jobs is believed to have reduced the number of job losses. However, experts warn that many furloughed jobs could become permanently redundant when the scheme ends.

What’s been included?

The number of redundancies shown in the visualisation are, where possible, for UK employees. In the few instances where it is not possible to break down a company’s announcement of global redundancies, we have included this number but have marked it out.

The Guardian has sourced information on company redundancies from their own announcements and media reports. While every effort has been made to include every redundancy we are aware of, the numbers listed will be an underestimate and will miss announcements from smaller companies.

Tell us more

If you are aware of any redundancies that are not included on our tracker, please fill in the form below and we will look into it.