BRITISH employers added 257,000 staff to their payrolls in November, adding to signs that the labour market withstood the end of the government's furlough scheme, according to data published on Tuesday (14).
The Bank of England has said it needs to be sure that the expiry of the scheme at the end of September has not caused a jump in unemployment, before taking any decision to raise interest rates for the first time since the pandemic.
But the emergence of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus at the end of November has prompted investors to scale back their bets on a rate hike by the BoE as soon as Thursday, after its December policy meetings.
