Why represent percent with "pc" rather than "%"?

I've seen more and more well respected publications expressing percent using the abbreviation "pc". E.g. Telegraph:

How else to explain the decision to award a board seat to the boss of an outfit that is 60pc-owned by the UAE?

The Telegraph, (Wayback Machine)

Every time I see this I find it jarring, but it seems to be becoming more common. Why would they do this when there's a perfectly appropriate symbol in "%"?

Two possible reasons I can think of, both of which sound odd to me:

• Maybe many people don't understand "%", and so "pc" is considered more accessible. Can this really be true? I find "pc" even more opaque personally. "%" is surely one of the first non-alpanumeric characters that people learn in school isn't it?
• Maybe there's a technological problem with printing % signs. I also find this unlikely. As Unicode support becomes effectively essential all across the web, it would be weird for an ago-old ASCII character to be problematic.

Anyone else know of a possible reason?

Someone wrote an answer here that was interesting, and then deleted it quite quickly after a skeptical comment was added. But I think it forms the basis of a good answer to this question:

The Cambridge dictionary defines "pc":

UK written abbreviation for percent

And there are some other references to "pc" being British. However, I'm British (nationally and culturally) and I found it pretty odd, so it's clearly not that British. And, as noted by Edwin Ashworth, the Guardian style guide recommends "%":

per cent

% in headlines and copy

The Wikipedia article on "percentage" mentions:

although the abbreviations pct., pct, and sometimes pc are also used.

And points to a Telegraph article as evidence. So it's clear the Telegraph is one of the main places doing this.

The Telegraph style guide says:

Percentages: per cent does not take a full point. Use pc only in headlines and % only in tables. In City page copy pc is acceptable. All percentages written in numbers, not in words: 5 per cent, never five per cent.

It doesn't explain what "City page copy" means, but I suspect it means coverage of the London-based financial sector, so maybe it's a tradition there.

The Wikipedia article on "Percent sign" has a section on "evolution", which mentions:

At some point, a scribe used the abbreviation "pc" with a tiny loop or circle (depicting the ending -o used in Italian ordinals, as in primo, secondo, etc.; it is analogous to the English "-th" as in "25th"). ... The "pc" with a loop eventually evolved into a horizontal fraction sign by 1650 (see below for an example in a 1684 text[27]) and thereafter lost the "per".

Conclusion

Overall, it seems like "pc" might well simply be a particularly archaic and British formulation, used in some circles with strong traditionalist attitudes (although not all that much in British society at large).

What I thought was an increase in general usage might have just been that the algorithms that serve me news articles have been showing me more from the Telegraph or similar outlets than they used to.