15 June 2020
As seems to have become the pattern with Government announcements regarding the support for businesses during Covid-19, details of further changes to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) were published on a Friday evening, in this case on 12 June.
The updates flesh out the announcement made a couple of weeks earlier that CJRS would change from 1 July 2020. Slowly, over the past three months, guidance about CJRS has been added to as anomalies were discovered and work-rounds were invented. These latest updates build on the existing body of government advice, which is now helpfully broken down into different web pages. If you want to:
- know the basics for making a CJRS claim, view here
- find out about which employees you can furlough and claim for through CJRS, view here
- find out about what to do to be ready to make a claim, view here
- make a claim under CJRS, read this
- know how to report payments under RTI, view here
- work out how much you can claim under CJRS, look at this
- read details of the changes to CJRS, follow this link
- look at examples of how to calculate CJRS claims, see here.
Avid readers will find much familiar in the updated guidance, but it should be noted that it is now too late to add previously unfurloughed employees to the scheme, with the exception of those employees who have been on statutory parental leave.
Claims for the period from 1 July onwards cannot be made until 1 July and the last date for making claims for individuals furloughed before 1 July is 31 July.
Previously, the claim period was for a minimum of three weeks of furlough but from 1 July the length of furlough can be as short or as long as the employer agrees with the employee. However, claims must be for a minimum period of a week, so only four a month. The month by month changes for the new scheme will bring about more complexity in calculating amounts to be claimed and it will be wise to try to avoid claims that span a month end.
No doubt civil servants and advisers have been thinking of as many ways as possible in which the new version of CJRS can be used and have tried to provide guidance accordingly. It remains to be seen if the ingenuity of British business can find variations on the theme not yet thought about, but we’ll have to wait for another Friday evening before we find out about these.
If you need help in understanding the transition between the two iterations of CJRS and how it may impact your business and its workforce, please feel free to contact me or your usual UHY adviser. If you aren’t already a client, please get in touch using our Contact us form and we will arrange for one of our specialists local to you to make contact.
