LONDON: Britain’s government will launch a media campaign this week to urge people to return to their workplaces, ramping up Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s calls to get economy back up to speed up after its hammering during the coronavirus lockdown.
Data has shown only 17% of workers in British cities had returned to their workplaces by early August, and one of the country’s business leaders said last week that big urban centres looked like ghost towns.
“The next stage we’ll look at is specifically the guidance on how to get back to work safely and we expect to see that later this week,” Johnson’s spokesman said, commenting on the government’s ongoing public information campaign.
Johnson’s message is that returning to work will help stimulate the economy, the spokesman said.
The government is hoping that the reopening of schools, which began in England this week, will help parents to get back to their workplaces after working from home since March in many cases.
Some 4.6 million working households in Britain have children under the age of 16. If all of these households had to make changes to their working arrangements to provide childcare, that would have affected one in seven workers in the UK.
Britain’s economic output shrank by more than 20% in the April-June period, bigger than all other large industrialised nations and its recovery has been moderate by comparison.
Many economists fear a sharp rise in unemployment as the government winds down its huge job retention scheme which is due to expire by the end of October.
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