Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced a new job retention scheme for firms bringing back staff to full time work from furlough.
In an ‘summer economic update’ today, Sunak announced that, if a company returns a furloughed staff member to full time work successfully, they will be entitled to a £1,000 bonus.
The individual must be continually employed through to January, and must earn at least £520 a month every month up until then – equivalent to the lower earnings band for national insurance.
This will ensure employees will be doing “decent work” on their return, Sunak said.
The bonus will be for all furloughed employees. If all nine million workers are returned, the programme to retain them will be worth £9bn.
Sunak said: “I want every person in this House and the country to know that I will never except unemployment as an unavoidable outcome. We haven’t done everything we have done so far to step back now and say job done. The truth is the job has only just begun.”
Speaking today, Sunak added that the government had already invested £49bn to support public services.
“Our interventions significantly protected people’s incomes with the least well off in society protected the most,” he said.
The crisis response has “highlighted the special bond holding our country together,” he added.
“This help has only been possible because we are a United Kingdom.”
In the last, two months economy contracted 25 per cent, the same as which it grew in the past 18 years, he said.
However, Sunak was clear that the furlough support scheme would come to an end in October.
“I know that when furlough ends it will be a difficult moment,” he said. “The truth is calling for endless extensions to the furlough is just as irresponsible as back in June calling to stop the scheme overnight.”
“The longer people are on furlough the more likely it is their skills will fade and the harder they will find it to get new opportunities.”
While he noted that the government “can’t protect every job”, Sunak said people should not be “trapped in a job that can only exist because of a government subsidy.”
At Prime Minster’s Questions earlier in the day, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford challenged Boris Johnson to stop thousands of job losses when government employment support ends, asking whether the government will commit to extending the furlough scheme.
Blackford said the government risked “sinking the lifeboat that has kept so many people afloat”
