Changes to the Job Retention Scheme 12 Jun 20

Further updates were announced to Job Retention Scheme on 12 June 2020 and the “Changes to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme” policy paper was released.  HMRC’s “Check if you can claim for your employees’ wages through the Coronovirus Job Retention Scheme” guidance has also been updated.

***update on 22 June 2020: HMRC has now updated its Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme: step by step guide for employers to reflect some of these changes***

The main changes are:

Introduction of Flexible Furloughing

• “Flexible furloughing” is available from 1 July 2020.  This means that you can bring employees back to work for any amount of time or work pattern and still claim under the CJRS for hours not worked, subject to wage caps
• “Wage caps” are proportional to the amount of hours an employee is furloughed in a month, so if an employee is furloughed for 60% of their hours, the wage cap for July 2020 is 60% of £2,500
• In order to use “flexible furloughing”, the member of staff must have already been furloughed for at least 3 weeks between 1 March and 30 June 2020 – this includes employees who are furloughed on or after 1 July because they are shielding or have childcare responsibilities
• Flexible furlough needs to be agreed with employees and records kept of this agreement for 5 years
• Records need to be kept of  the hours that staff work and do not work during a flexible furlough period
• Any flexible furlough agreement needs to be consistent with employment, equality and discrimination laws
• Employers have to pay employees for hours worked and can continue to “top-up” wages if they wish
• Employees can still be fully furloughed after 1 July, in which case they still cannot do any work
• For any furloughing arrangement that begins before 1 July, it needs to continue for 3 weeks – even if it crosses over from 30 June to 1 July; furloughing arrangements that begin after 1 July can (in theory) be for any length of time but the minimum claims period within a month is 7 days unless it includes the first or last day of the month (see the “Making a claim” section below)

Other changes

• It has been confirmed that the Coronovirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) will close on 31 October 2020
• From 1 August 2020, the level of the grant will be reduced each month as follows:

Making a claim

• 31 July is the last date that you can make claims for periods ending on or before 30 June.  There is no maximum length of time for claims that relate to 30 June and before
• Claims cannot "straddle" 30 June and 1 July; separate claims need to be made for periods up to 30 June and claims that relate to 1 July onwards
• You cannot claim for periods in July, before 1 July and the minimum number of days you can claim is 7 days (unless your claim includes the beginning or end of a month).  Ideally the claims should match to the dates that payroll is processed
• From 1 July onwards, claims must start and end in the same calendar month
• The number of staff you can claim for in periods after 1 July is capped by the maximum number of staff you have claimed for in a period before 1 July
• If you claim in advance for employees who are being "flexibly furloughed" and the employee works more hours than anticipated, you will need to pay back any overclaim