Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate his Department has made of the number of redundancies that may have been avoided if the announcement on the extension of the coronavirus job retention scheme had been made earlier.

The Government had always made clear that economic support would continue past the end of October and had announced the Job Support Scheme to do just that. Extending the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme to the end of March 2021 instead responds to the latest economic conditions.

We have set out that employees that were employed and on an employers’ payroll on 23 September 2020 (the day before the Job Support Scheme announcement) who were made redundant or stopped working afterwards can be re-employed and claimed for under the CJRS extension.