Important change to eligibility of Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme

The Chancellor has made a Treasury Direction under Sections 71 and 76 of the Coronavirus Act 2020 which sets out the legal framework for the Scheme, including an important change to the scheme’s employee eligibility criteria.

The Direction states that:

The employer must have a pay as you earn (“PAYE”) scheme registered on HMRC’s real time information system for PAYE on 19 March 2020 (“a qualifying PAYE scheme”).

Previously the cut-off date was 28 February 2020. The updated criteria includes:

  • you can claim for employees that were employed as of 19 March 2020 and were on your PAYE payroll on or before that date; this means that you will have made an RTI submission notifying HMRC of payment of that employee on or before 19 March 2020
  • employees that were employed as of 28 February 2020 and on payroll (i.e. notified to HMRC in an RTI submission on or before 28 February) and were made redundant or stopped working for you after that, and prior to 19 March 2020, can also qualify for the scheme if you re-employ them and put them on furlough.

The BVRLA has raised concerns to ministers that those companies who make their RTI submissions on or after the 20th of each month, and will have to use their February RTI submission, could be disadvantaged as new employees could be left out of scope of the scheme.

The association is suggesting that it would be sensible to base employee eligibility criteria on an employee’s start date.

Government data on transport use 

The Government has started to publish the transport data that is sent by the Department for Transport to the Cabinet Office each day for use in the government’s daily media briefings.

It shows changes in:

  • road traffic in Great Britain
  • rail passenger journeys in the UK
  • rail station concourse footfall at a set of monitored stations
  • Transport for London’s (TfL) tube and bus routes
  • bus travel in Great Britain (excluding London)

The data is compiled in as near to real time as possible and also includes a document setting out information on the data sources and methodology used to generate each of the headline measures.

All the slides and datasets that have been used to accompany coronavirus press conferences can be found on this new web page.