Flexible furlough scheme update for September 2020

The latest statistics show over 9.6 million employees have been on Furlough since March and currently there are 1.2 million Furloughed in August. This amounts to over £34.7billion in grants from the Coronavirus Job Retention scheme which ends in October. The next round of changes to the scheme takes place on 1st September, so here’s a reminder of what the changes look like:

What you need to do from 1 September

• From 1 September CJRS will pay 70% of usual wages up to a cap of £2,187.50 per month for the hours furloughed employees do not work.
• You will still need to pay your furloughed employees at least 80% of their usual wages for the hours they do not work, up to a cap of £2,500 per month. You will need to fund the difference between this and the CJRS grant yourself.
• The caps are proportional to the hours not worked. For example, if your employee is furloughed for half their usual hours in September, you are entitled to claim 70% of their usual wages for the hours they do not work up to £1,093.75 (50% of the £2,187.50 cap).
• You will continue to have to pay furloughed employees’ National Insurance (NI) and pension contributions from your own funds.

Making sure your data is right

It is important that you provide all the data HMRC need to process your claim. Payment of your grant may be at risk or delayed if you submit a claim that is incomplete or incorrect, so we want to help you get this right, especially bearing in mind that according to a recent Daily Mail report, a recent study by academics at Oxford, Cambridge and Zurich universities revealing “widespread abuse” of the £30bn system, HMRC are likely to redouble their efforts to uncover any errors in submissions.