Impact on daily life

Impact 22nd July
UK is spending huge amounts of money because of the virus.  Chancellor says we will have to pay for all the spending.  There has been a review and it looks as if pay will be frozen again and some departments will have budget cuts.  Although the pay freeze stopped in 2017, the increases in pay that people got, came out of the normal budget, so there were still cuts in other parts of the department budget – less resources to work with. There is some discussion about having “austerity” again – where all pay and spending has to be reduced.
If you need to apply for a passport to go on holiday, then you may have to wait.  There is a queue of 400 thousand.  The department says that because of social distancing they have only half the staff and everything is taking much longer.
A-level grades were estimated by teachers because there were no exams due to the virus.  The exam board says the estimates were too high and they have reduced the grades by about 10% to make the results look like previous years.  All students will have at least one subject where the final grade will be less than what their teachers asked for.
Scientists in the UK are still warning about the second wave of virus which they think will happen in the winter.  They want to get prepared with better testing and catching people with the virus as quickly as possible.  They say masks will have to be used by everyone and handshakes may be gone forever.  This is bad news again for the deaf community because close contact is part of the culture.

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