Reader TTS

Getting onto the property ladder is every twenty-something’s pipe dream. A fortnight ago, that dream came true for me. Then, last week, my employer began redundancy consultations with a

number of staff, including me. The news of lay-offs has since turned my two-bed flat on the outskirts of London into an emotional albatross, hanging stressfully around my neck. Newspapers

have not had an easy pandemic, due to the almost ruinous drop in advertising revenue that resulted from lockdown, and the paper for which I work is no different. The economic impact of Covid

seems to be even more heavily reported than the death toll, now that the initial wave appears to have subsided. The government bombards us with endless campaigns to catapult people out of

the comfort of their front rooms, back into disinfected offices. It’s a drive I understand. I was never a regular Pret patron myself, but I passed enough sandwich shops on my way into the

office pre-coronavirus to realise just how much of a staple it and other chains are in many commuters’ daily lives. But this “get back to the office” drive feels like a sticking plaster on a

gushing wound. Too little too late. The personal stories, I fear, are getting lost among the noise of GDP figures and a national debt I’d struggle to find the zeros for. Just yesterday

Costa announced a cut of 1,650 jobs. These numbers are so high that there’s no possible way to listen to each and every one of their stories. “One death is a tragedy; a million is a

statistic,” Stalin is supposed to have said. At the risk of bad taste, I’d say that the principle applies to redundancies too. I’m relatively new to the world of professional work, so these

redundancy consultations are almost literally my first rodeo. There’s still a chance that I will survive the restructure — but even the prospect of potentially losing my job, with a shiny

new £285,000 mortgage to my name, keeps me awake at night. Every one of those Costa workers — and hundreds of thousands of others now being laid off — will be asking themselves the same

question: “Where is the money for the roof over my head going to come from?” I was exceptionally lucky during lockdown. I continued to work and earned a full salary, didn’t have to commute

on expensive, dirty trains, and managed to complete on a property. Despite the possible upcoming redundancy, I remain grateful to my employers for their management of the crisis. But there

appears, so far, to be no governmental support for those who lost their jobs due to the pandemic — only remorseless statements from our multi-millionaire Chancellor.  Rishi Sunak put

millions of employees on furlough-scheme life-support, on which he now intends to pull the plug in a few weeks. He told the BBC in July: “If you’re asking me, can I protect every single job,

of course, the answer is no. Is unemployment going to rise… Yes.”  A tacit understanding that “that’s just the circle of life” just isn’t good enough. Where are the economic schemes to

encourage employers to keep on as many un-furloughed staff as possible? Where is the support for those Costa workers, who may need retraining as the high street dies an expedited death?

Thousands of families’ lives are being destroyed by the disastrous governmental mismanagement of what is now a recession. The cost to individuals’ mental health is almost never reported in

news bulletins, who rightly have to focus on the big picture. The uncertainty is unbearable and makes efforts to plan ahead impossible. I’m grateful that my job ever existed in the first

place. Growing up at school, listening to Ricky Gervais’s infamous podcast series that propelled the medium into the mainstream, I’d never have believed that people would one day actually

pay you to make podcasts. I hope the recession doesn’t take that away, and that the government does _something_ to help those whose jobs didn’t survive the Covid crash. And if anyone’s

hiring a current affairs producer, you can find me in my new flat, endlessly painting bedroom walls and researching energy-efficient fridge-freezers.