more normal have been replaced by a realisation that covid will be around for much longer than we first thought. its impact on how we live and how we work has been far more significant than feared and our social lives and shopping habits in our travel plans all changed by this pandemic. and now we are learning to live with this virus, but learning to live with it and its consequences will be harder, the lostjobs and the rising prices, and a big covid bill still to pay. getting back to where we were will take time and the big question is, just how long will it take? since the pandemic began last year, the whole united kingdom... the start of 2021, it was not a happy new year. but we now have a new variant of the virus. we must therefore go into a national lockdown which is tough enough to contain this variant. that means the government is once again instructing you to stay—at—home. a rise in cases plunged the country back into a national lockdown. shops are bars and restaurants were forced to close once again. any festive cheer turned into a painful hangover. schools shut their doors. travel ground to a halt. office workers settled down in spare rooms and on kitchen tables, to work from home once again. and for those who couldn't, and extended furlough scheme helped to prop up earnings. the scheme supported the wages of more than 11.7 million people and after it launched in march in 2020. but it came at a heavy price, and by the time the scheme was wound down in the summer it had cost more than £70 billion. but even then many firms feared it was being withdrawn too soon. many still were not able to operate at full capacity and warned that without financial help they could be forced to close. how confident are you that you will be here this time next year? difficult question. i want to still be here and i will do my damnedest to still be here. the true cost of the pandemic is still hard to calculate. as well as thejob retention scheme there were loans and grants for businesses, to help them through the worst of the crisis, the total cost hit nearly £380 billion. but that support kept the economy moving. businesses were closed and workers stuck at home, but the economy avoided another huge slump. second time around businesses and workers had learned to better navigate the restrictions. unemployment began to fall, cushioned by the furlough scheme, but remained stubbornly high with many still unable to get back to full—time work. prices began to rise, as well, prompted by supply shortages and rising demand, as the economy began to reopen later in the year. inflation hit a ten year high, prompting a rise in interest rates with speculation that more could follow. gdp had fallen very sharply, lockdowns naturally did that but we quickly saw a rebound by the second quarter as things started to reopen. the second lockdown, businesses were able to reopen more, able to operate factories, businesses were able to get back up and running and we did see that in the economic growth? exactly. the restrictions were limited to contact services, and a lot of businesses were allowed to carry on. schools were not as disrupted as they were the first time around, so various areas of the economy were allowed to continue. at the start of the year we had unemployment at around 5.3%, 1.8 million people, and then out on top of that we also had another fit of the population on some form of government support be it the furlough scheme or self employed help and also a lot of people that fell through the gaps. but it highlights the extent of the support that was required to just bridge the gap through the lockdown period. of course, since then unemployment has come down very sharply but all of the indicators currently suggest that the labour market is looking very strong, plenty of demand for workers and if anything, not enough work is available, who are skilled to fill the jobs that are out there. what happens in 2022? what will be year look like economically? we should complete the recovery in gdp terms in 2022 and there is still further catch up because the economy would have naturally grown anyway had it not been for the downturn. the big challenge will be at high inflation, the energy information that we have seen in wholesale markets has not fully fed into household sectors yet, and the increase in the energy price cap in october was just ten, 11% increase but we potentially have another 17% increase coming through in april and that will be a major shock for households when it happens. while every part of the economy continued to feel the impact of the pandemic, the hospitality industry was one of the hardest hit, and even now it is dealing with a reintroduction of restrictions that many firms hoped were long gone. pubs and bars and restaurants and hotels all bore the brunt of lockdown rules. despite spending millions on new safety measures to protect their customers. and their staff. just so nice to be with people again. in april hospitality venues were able to reopen after a winter of lockdown. but they could only do so outdoors and even then there were limits on numbers and it meantjust a third of hospitality venues could trade, those that had outdoor space or a beer garden. it is nice to get together and to share what we have been doing. feels like forever, that we have been able to sit down together. they are managing it quite well. you need to be out with your friends i and family and do these things. . it was really challenging because you simply don't know, we did have pre—bookings and people were booking because of the social distancing space limitations but it still meant you had a mismatch between supply and demand where you had an unpredictable number of people coming, very heavily weather dependent in the early part, april and may, where people would cancel their bookings very last minute because they could not sit outside, and crucially it meant it was difficult to get staff to come back to work and recruit new staff into the industry because we could not offer them a stable career choice and we could not offer them a guaranteed set of hours for them to return to hospitality. others had to wait until may to reopen indoors, and even then it wasn't business as usual. with nervous customers staying away and many others deterred by the rule of six limits. nice to be back as a team and nice to see our regulars once again. we are down financially, we are down, but we are surviving and we hope to survive. three, two, one. cheering byjuly at nearly all remaining restrictions three, two, one. byjuly at nearly all remaining restrictions were lifted in england. but they came with a warning from the prime minister that life would not instantly revert to normal. but that initial excitement gave way to a realisation that the pandemic was far from over. tighter restrictions remained in wales, scotland and northern ireland, and in december england reintroduced some rules, moving into its so—called plan b, and as 0micron cases began to rise so did cancellations. many hospitality firms reported a slump in christmas bookings as fears of a new wave of infection convinced customers to stay—at—home. michael represents the night—time industries, bars and music venues and nightclubs, and he told me firms had learned to adapt but many struggled to stay open. there were so many confusing guidelines and rules, even things where the local authorities and police were really struggling to interpret, so for an industry that had been somewhat beleaguered, it was a very difficult time, especially economically, they were struggling, but in terms of the cultured side of things and then and nightclubs, once they were given the opportunity, they were out of the box because some of those youngsters were starved of those social environments and they can go out and enjoy. 850,000 new 18—year—olds came of age during that period, who were without this and were dying to get out to graze the dance floor with whatever moves they felt were right. it is fair to say the pandemic revealed some of the failings of the industry and businesses have taken those things, like not paying staff enough? without a doubt, we can see some of the failings and shortcomings on our side and we have work to do in terms of safeguarding and looking after staff. rates, environment, all of these key elements are going to make a difference, but we also need to invest in them. what will 2020 look like? i want to believe that 2022 will be our opportunity to take a handle on this and move forward, because we need the confidence back and the uncertainty to be taken away. we need strong economic drivers to allow us to rebuild and we need tourism back without a doubt and that has got to be a huge consideration, even with new variants coming forward. like hospitality, the travel industry struggled to get off the ground this year, as well. travel did start again but with strict fast changing rules. february saw the introduction of hotel quarantine. uk residents returning from coronavirus hotspots abroad had to book a ten night stay in an improved airport hotel. other foreign visitors were still off—limits. by the summer foreign holidays where possible, at last, but with expensive test to take and long forms to fill in, for many a trip to the sun was still out of reach. how are you feeling about this holiday? really excited. to be going away again after these lockdowns. normally go in the holidays, something to look forward to, but i have to say, this has been a pretty stressful anxious time for everybody, so not sure i would do it again, knowing what i know from this experience. the impact of the frequently changing rules prompted anger from the industry. what we don't understand is why the uk which has been so successful with vaccines is expecting its vaccinated citizens travelling to portugal, coming back, to currency, because they have already been vaccinated, so they are making up as they go along and it is more mismanagement of the covid recovery from thejohnson government and sadly it has unnecessary disruption and stress for thousands, hundreds of thousands of british families. as the year went on and despite the challenges, confidence began to return. bookings jumped as airlines and passengers learned to navigate the restrictions. for many it was their first holiday since the pandemic began. and for the travel industry, their first steps on the long road to recovery. take us back, laura is from the travel firm sky scanner. we have seen a huge changing the way the industry has approached the pandemic and we have seen resilience from both travellers and the industry in the way we have had to adapt. flexibility is something that was relatively unheard of before the pandemic and something we have become accustomed to. like tickets and bookings and refunds? yes, flexible policies. probably a greater understanding of insurance and being able to change your plans is something that whilst not always what people have in mind, it has enabled people to feel more confident if they are thinking about going away. the industry did learn to adapt and navigate the new rules but the arrival of 0micron, the new variant, has brought new uncertainty. about how and where we can travel. we believe this will be a significant setback for demand this winter and real impact on christmas, people will now cancel or postpone travel plans and for a sector that has not had any revenue for 18 months, give or take a few months in the summer, it is really significant. airlines don't make money in the winter so we have a difficult stretch ahead. 0n the high street, there was a quicker return to something more normal. shops reopened and shoppers, in need of a retailfix, rushed back. what have you got? a pair of trousers. i have bought my little boy three outfits, from the sales. do not show my partner this. i have had my firstjab but i have got my mask for going into places. but covid has changed our habits and the shift to online gathered pace in the pandemic and it means retailers are having to work much harder to keep us coming back to the high street. i'm so relieved that we have got here. we have been closed for around eight months out of the last 13 and how can you really run a business like that? we have an online presence so that has been really helpful. i don't know what would have happened if it had not been online. 2021 was also supposed to be the year that we returned to the office en masse and finally ditching the kitchen table and zoom calls but concerns over the roll—out of the vaccine and the need for staff to self—isolate meant that many bosses adopted a new hybrid model, some time working in the office and some time at home. we are never going to go back to working the way we used to work. people working from home 3—4 days will need 20% less space but we won't do that if everyone is working from home on mondays and fridays so we have got to manage that, i think, quite carefully. the implications for our town and city centres were clear. we rely heavily on the office trade. there is locations that have 5000 people and only 140 people came to the building so most people were working from home or maybe just once a week coming. that makes it really difficult. experts predicted the pandemic would change our lives in many ways but it has brought some unexpected problems as well. not least a lack of workers. the uk's formal exit from the eu at the start of 2021 added to the complications. many workers who left because a brexit or covid, did not return. the impact was felt across industries. with a shortage of lorry drivers, abattoir butchers, fruit pickers a nd restau ra nt staff. in hospitality and retail, the hgv driver shortage caused particular problems for suppliers, especially for items shipped in from overseas. it led to empty shelves and apologies to customers. a shortage of drivers means that you might find your bins are collected a bit less frequently than they were in the past, and it is part of a wider problem across the industry, of a shortage of drivers, whether that is for rubbish or restaurants and supermarkets. it is the perfect storm we have been talking about, so less testing through the pandemic, the exodus of eu skills as a result of brexit we have had this thing which is about tax treatment for the industry and we also have this ageing workforce of drivers in the uk which we have known about for some time, but in the uk every week, 2000 drivers leave the industry and only 1000 drivers arejoint so we have got a real mismatch. we will talk much more about one of my favourite issues which is bin collections because we have talked about this before but it is something which is so important and one of those industries we absolutely do take for granted. there were also shortages on the forecourt, petrol supplies ran dry. not because of a lack of fuel but a lack of drivers to deliver it. it meant scenes like this were repeated across the country. shocked, how am i going to get to work? my missus is nine months pregnant and i could actually get stuck somewhere and not be able to get back. i'm empty now, running on fumes. what are you going to do? hopefully get fuel. those shortages were just the first taste of the new challenges as the economy reopened. rising demand, worker shortages, supply issues and soaring energy prices, have pushed up prices in supermarkets, forecourts and in factories, shipping costs also hit record highs as the world reopened to global trade. inflation in the uk hit a ten year high. as prices rise, wages are not keeping pace, and it means a squeeze on already stretched incomes. when we talk about a standard of living and a incoming squeeze we mean prices are going up faster than wages and that is what we are having right now and that could be unpleasant and it will be one of the biggest issues for next year. how does the chancellor respond? he is in a difficult spot because his instincts are to get the public debt, down over time, and if you look at the amount of total debt in the uk it is at £2.2 trillion and to give you an idea how much that is, if you went back to when the pyramids were being built 5000 years ago, and started spending £1 million per day, you would be about two thirds of the way through by now. it is a huge number. it doesn't really matter because usually you measure debt compared to income, the national income, and the total national debt is equal to the total national income roughly and that is the highest it has been for a long time. his instinct is to try and get that down. you can do that in a couple of ways, raise taxes, which he has done, and cut spending which he has had a hard time doing it during a pandemic, so what does he do next? people think if you are going to tax the economy you are going to stop it growing as fast and the other big problem apart from inflation is growth. because nothing is a bigger debt killer than growth. if you haven't got that, you have got a problem, and the most recent forecasts are that the economy is not forecast to grow very fast in the years to come. what has been fascinating about this year is that all of this has happened and then in the background we have brexit and that has barely got a look in but it has had an impact. if you look back to the beginning of the year there was a lot of consternation that because of the new rules coming in and the fact we were not in the customs union and single market, it would mean tailbacks for trucks 50 miles long? it did not happen. the worst case scenario, the armageddon of huge delays at the border did not happen, but having said that, there are some companies who found it much more difficult to export. it takes us to the point of here we go again. it is all looking horribly familiar, we are sat here december, 2021, it feels very reminiscent of christmas last year. given what we are seeing. all bets are off for next year. it feels like groundhog day but we know more than we did this time last year and we have all been through an intensive course of how to deal with a pandemic. the good news is, the economy is still growing, employees are back at work, largely, and we did not see the massive spike in unemployment we thought we might at the end of the furlough scheme so those are reasons to be positive but what is difficult for the economy and for the chancellor and businesses, it feels a bit reluctant to invest, am i going to build anotherfactory and hire another 5000 people, am i going to send them on training? that is important because the higher wage high skills economy that the government wants and that we all want, relies on business doing a lot of the heavy lifting on that in terms of investment, and business investment is still very very weak and until we see that coming back i think we have to be a bit cautious about how confident you are in what is going to happen to the economy. watching the resourcefulness and the resilience of business has been humbling, actually. they have actually pulled it out of the bag and i think in many ways business, if you look at what happened, getting food supplies in, business had a pretty good crisis and i think people realised that business was important and that it could be a force for good. and really, used its ingenuity and resilience and resourcefulness to fix some problems that were really affecting society. many hoped that 2022 would notjust be a new year but a new start, that the worst of the pandemic would be over, but the arrival of a new variant has brought new challenges. it has exhorted business and everyone to think again and to do things differently, but quite what that looks like is still not clear. well, we've got some exceptionally mild weather on the way over the next few days. possibly record—breaking in some parts of the uk, it really is going to be super mild. let me show you what's happening, the air is travelling all the way from the southern claims. this is the atlantic subtropics here, and if you look closely, there is this tongue a very warm air from around about the subtropics here moving across the azores. here's the coast of portugal and spain, and then that my other sweeps into western parts of europe and will wash away the frost that's currently and in central and eastern parts of europe. how warm it effectively or mild is it going to get? well, because he has up 17 in england, the average is closer to eight. now, it's really mild out there already anyway. temperatures roundabout figures in the south of the country. culture in the north. we have had frosts at night in scotland, and it is going to be clear with a touch of frost to come as a mist and fog forming, but towards the early hours, we will see a weather from sweeping intimate this is basically the leading edge, the leading edge of that very mild air that is coming in from the southwest. so look at that 14 in from the southwest. so look at that 1a degrees celsius at 6am in plymouth. that is extraordinary, really. the smile there keep sweeping across the uk. he had a bet, the weather front, sweeping across the uk. he had a bet, the weatherfront, many sweeping across the uk. he had a bet, the weather front, many of us will see rain both in the morning and early afternoon on wednesday. by the end of wednesday, that rain will be in the north. a look at these temperatures widely in the mid teens for england and wales, the northern half of the country will be a little bit cooler but still above the average for the time of year. so that was wednesday. thursday, if anything, will be mild or stale, not by a huge amount, but we think that mild air will spread further north, and again, with that comes and rain. around 16 celsius in yorkshire on thursday and of december at around 12 degrees expected in glasgow, and it could even hit 17 celsius. we do it could even hit 17 celsius. we do it all over again on friday. we keep the south—westerly winds, very mild once again across the uk, it's going to be a super, super mild new year's eve across many parts of the uk. again, 15—16 even across northern parts of england. it certainly in the south, so i think the outlook for new year's eve could well be record—breaking mild weather. how about that? bye—bye. a record number of new covid infections — nearly 130,000 across the uk. as the booster rollout continues, there are early signs 0micron is leading to fewer hospitalisations than before. children are watching what we do more than listening to what we say. a new government campaign tells how teenagers of parents who smoke are four times more likely to smoke too. protests outside court as the kremlin bans one of russia's oldest and best known human rights organisations. as quickly as possible. oh, there we go! and questions and recriminations after england lose the ashes to australia after a comprehensive drubbing.

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