London
British unemployment jumped in the first quarter on the back of coronavirus, despite a lockdown being imposed only near the end of the period, official data showed Tuesday.
The total number of unemployed people rose 50,000 to 1.3 million in three months to March from a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said in a statement.
Britain had imposed a lockdown on March 23 in a bid to halt the spread of the coronavirus, and launched a so-called furlough jobs retention scheme under which the government stepped in to back up employee wages. —AFP
