Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the effect of the covid-19 outbreak on levels of (a) redundancy and (b) unemployment.

Estimates of the number of redundancies and the number of people who are unemployed are compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using the Labour Force Survey (LFS).

The latest estimate for the number of redundancies is 227,000 (June to August 2020), compared with 107,000 for the period from January to March 2020.

The latest estimate of the number of people who are unemployed is 1.522 million (June to August 2020), compared with 1.365 million for the period from January to March 2020.

All estimates used in this answer are publicly available on the ONS website (https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/summaryoflabourmarketstatistics